The Ghoul

Hal Trask slouched in the visitor’s chair opposite his editor Wiley Kramer. "Like your newest obit, Hal," Kramer said, tapping the ash from his cigar at his ashtray. "It’s a go if you can slice a thousand words or so."

Kramer was new on the Minneapolis Gazette, else he wouldn’t have bothered asking. "I never know what to cut," Hal said.

A gunnery sergeant of a man with a brush cut and a granite jaw, Kramer pointed his cigar at Hal. "I wanna move you into features. This Omaha Beach stuff is sensational; it would be a perfect Veteran’s Day feature. If you can write like thisfor an--"

"I only do obituaries," Hal said. Kramer’s scowl reminded Hal of his grandmother’s favorite admonition: If you’re not careful, your face will grow that way.

"I’ve been looking at what we pay you," Kramer said, "and if

you’ll agree to the change, I’ll double your salary."

"That might be nice, but it would take away from my free time."

Kramer’s bit down hard on the stub of his cigar. "Some of your co-workers tell me you spend a lot of time at Mary of Fatima Rest Home. I don’t think that’s healthy for a young fellow like you; let’s try one feature assignment; if you don’t like it, you can go back to writing obits. Your file says you’ve won the OWA award three years in a row; if that were me, I’d be itching to move up to features."

"I just find old-timers more interesting . . . They have no reason to lie for one thing; they’re about to meet their maker and they know it."

Kramer looked towards his telephone where all of the lights were blinking yellow. "Have your way, Trask. Just keep your death notices under two hundred and fifty words."

"Is that all?" Hal said, standing. He had a session with a depression-era farmer in a half hour. The man had chronic emphysema and Hal had only just begun his interviews.

Kramer waved him away.

Hal breathed a sigh of relief. He hated confrontation and had almost agreed to do the one feature.

#

The hacks on the Gazette referred to Hal as "The Ghoul" because he spent so much time at hospitals, senior citizens’ homes and funerals, but there was method in his madness; very often he had an obituary on file before the oldster expired.

Mandy Niles and Shirley Evans, nurses at Mary of Fatima, gossiped about Hal. Both were in their early twenties and couldn’t believe a man could be so obsessed with his work.

The two girls speculated about what Hal’s real reason might be for spending so much time here.

Mandy was short, flat, and chunky in the hips. "I’ll bet he’s a defrocked priest," she said. "You know, he just can’t resist being around the sick."

Shirley, a buxom blonde whose uniform fit like a Speedo, said, "I’d say it’s something about that Life After Life book. That white light business. He’s doin’ research."

"I’ve seen a couple of people die," Mandy said. "The light goes out of their eyes; I’ll bet that’s their soul leaving."

"Nope. Just the electrical circuits shutting down."

"You’re such a cynic. He’s kind of cute; do you think he’s interested in women?"

"You have to be kidding."

Events would prove her wrong.

#

Hal’s true passion was taxidermy. Away from the Gazette and Mary of Fatima, Hal closeted himself in his basement working on "his art." There was a lot more to taxidermy than most people thought. With a fish, for instance, you had to turn the thing inside out without losing the scales, and you had to scrape every piece of meat out or it would smell. It took Hal twelve to fourteen hours to prepare an average mount.

Kramer had been wrong about him; he was constantly looking for a challenge. He’d become bored with mounting twelve-point bucks and ten-pound walleyes. He’d flirted with domestic pets and had won plaudits for his golden retrievers and Siamese cats. He’d even done a draft horse once for a farmer who could not live without his beloved percheron. The man had been thrilled with his work. "Trojan is almost as good as new," the farmer said. "You can almost feel the blood pumping through his veins." But Hal’s basement was closing in on him. The dusty old bottles on the shelves made him sneeze and the tanning chemicals were giving him a rash. Hal scrubbed the basement from top to bottom with Spic and Span, but it didn’t help. Spiders loved the stuff; they built cities of interlocking cobwebs. The place needed human companionship and that would be Hal’s greatest challenge of all.

#

Mary of Fatima was a riot of sounds in the early evening. The squeak of a nurse’s crepe soles as she padded along the corridor, the tap, tap of a cane on hard wood. As Hall moved toward Sven Thormodsgaard’s room, the smell of masked urine made him wince.

Hal reached down and shook Sven Thormodsgaard’s chapped hand. Sven had done some hard thinking about his proudest accomplishment, and it wasn’t fathering twelve children or marrying Sigrid, his wife of sixty years. It was building a circular barn. He’d hauled the rocks for the foundation from fifty miles away. Sven showed Hal a picture of it in HARKER’S BARNS; VISIONS OF AN AMERICAN ICON.

"Perfect," Hal said. "Just the angle I need." As Sven was offering Hal some of the fudge his grandson had smuggled in, a buzzer went off and Shirley and Mandy hurried by with a crash cart.

On his way out, Hal asked the nurse at the front desk about the emergency. "Lacie Livermore. You don’t know her. Such a shame. Inoperable cancer, and she’s only twenty-six."

"Is she dead?"

"They managed to revive her, but it may have been better if they’d let her die. She’s in such awful pain."

#

They say there’s no such thing as love at first sight, but they’re wrong. One look at Lacie Livermore and Hal Trask was a goner. She had ebony eyes like in the song and brushed-back raven hair to complement them. She was as pale as a Geisha, which heightened the color of her dark hair and gave her skin a porcelain shine.

Hal hadn’t known he’d fallen in love at first, but he dreamed about Lacie at night and woke calling her name.

She wanted to know what he was laughing at when he realized the irony. You’ve never been in love, he told himself. You thought you’d never find anyone; then you go and fall for a dead woman.

Her temperament was as good as her appearance. He had introduced himself and told her he was a reporter here to interview her about her career as a long-distance runner. Shirley had tipped him about her second-place finish in the 5,000 meters at the 2000 Olympics.

"What’s it like to be a newspaperman?" she asked. "I’ll bet you meet lots of interesting people."

"I met Jessica Lange once," he said. "She lives in Stillwater."

"My favorite actress," she said.

"Would you like to meet her?" he said. He didn’t know why he’d said that. He doubted Jessica would even remember him.

"I don’t think so," she said. "It would be an imposition. People must always be bothering her."

"That’s why she lives in Stillwater," he said. "Minnesota nice and all that; everybody leaves her alone."

"Did they tell you about me?" she said.

"About your Cancer?" he said.

"They say I don’t have long to live."

He stared down at the awful beige-colored floor tile. "Is there anything I can get you?" he finally said.

"Just come and see me again; you’re easy to talk to. Most guys are so monosyllabic. Bring Jessica if she’s game." She laughed; she knew he was an imposter.

Hal bought a bottle of Johnny Walker Red that night, got so snockered he couldn’t make it to bed. Woke up the next morning on the floor next to the TV set, lying in a puddle of booze. When he tried to work on his latest project, a boa constrictor named Arnold Schwarzenegger, his heart just wasn’t in it.

Then, to top it off, Sven died. He’d grown kind of attached to the old bugger. Hal went to Lacie’s room and held her hand for a couple of hours. "Have you been drinking?" she said.

"How did you know?" he said.

"You smell like rubbing alcohol."

"Can’t be me, then. Johnny Walker Red is good Scotch."

Today she looked sick; her cheek bones were more prominent or something. "What’s wrong?" she said.

"Sven died. He’s this old guy I come to see. He reminded me a lot of my father.

The ebony eyes glistened, and she stroked his face with her velvety fingers. "How come we never met before?" she said.

"Because God is a jerk."

"Don’t say that; you’ll get me sent to purgatory. I wish we’d known each other all our lives," she said.

"No you don’t. People at work call me ‘The Ghoul’; I write obituaries for a living; I do taxidermy for fun."

"That is weird. When are you going to kiss me, Ghoul?"

#

Hal felt out of place at her funeral. The only person he knew was Shirley Evans and she was with her boyfriend. The priest said this long generic prayer that made Hal want to hit him with the shovel Lacie’s mother used to toss in the first spadeful of dirt. She broke down crying after that as did Lacie’s married sisters and her aunts and what looked like a bunch of Olympic athletes.

He knew he couldn’t live without Lacie. He returned to Oak Lawn every day and stayed until dusk. One time he stayed all night. What does a man think about when he spends all day and all night at a graveyard? Nothing much. How am I going to end it all? What’s the most painless way? Pills? No, women take pills; Guys always use a gun. But he knew he could never do that. He liked to think he didn’t believe all that religious rot about how people who committed suicide burned in Hell for eternity, but he wasn’t about to take the chance. As he lay at the side of Lacie’s grave, hugging her headstone, he noticed something: the damn graveyard didn’t have a hell of a lot of security. This old guy with a flashlight would walk by every couple of hours and say, "How yah doing, pal?" then move on down the path. What was to

prevent . . . ?

#

A couple of nights later Hal was there with a thermos full of coffee he shared with the watchman. The guard would be asleep for as long as it took.

It was three in the morning and the moon was full, so lustrous the craters on the yellow orb formed frown lines. The wind howled like a banshee, dust swirling about him as he drove the shovel through the sod; by the time he was finished, he was covered with sweat and muck. When he wrenched open the lid of her coffin and brushed the dirt away from her face, she was as fresh as the day she crossed the finish line to take the silver medal. He put his ear to her mouth, imagining he could hear her breathing. He’d heard about instances where people had been buried alive. No, it was just his nerves. She was as cold as the marble statues at Mary of Fatima chapel.

#

Jimmy Reese was the youngest detective on the squad, so young-looking he often got carded during the Friday night bull sessions at O’Hara’s Bar and Grill.

He kicked the sod in front of Lacie Livermore’s grave. The other dicks had given him a really hard time about this case. They knew every Ed Gein joke in the book. Jimmy had never even heard of Ed Gein. Perry McCain reveled in telling him about the soup bowls made out of human skulls, the chairs upholstered in human skin, the belt studded with female nipples, and of course, the shirt made of human skin, complete with breasts, that Eddie sometimes wore to bed. Jimmy hadn’t been able to eat any dinner after that and now he was starving to death.

The watchman Jimmy interviewed told him about this strange guy who had visited Lacie Livermore’s grave for something like a week. "Thought he might’ve been her husband, so I let him stay as long as he wanted," the watchman said.

"Was he here the night her grave was broken into?"

"It weren’t him. You could tell he loved her. Besides, why would he go to the trouble of payin’ for the headstone only to dig ‘er up?"

"You didn’t answer me."

"Sure, he was here; him and me had coffee together. Like I said, he was a real nice fellah."

"Did you happen to catch his name?"

"Nope. Good-looking boy, though."

"Would you know him if you saw him again?"

"I think so. He kind of looks like that fellow used to be on ‘The West Wing.’"

"Martin Sheen?"

"Nah, the young one. Chad Lowe I think his name is.

"That’s Rob. Chad is his brother."

Jimmy sat in his car, chewing on what the watchman had told him about the man so consumed by Lacie Livermore he hadn’t been able to leave her side even in death.

From the cemetery, Jimmy drove to an address in Rosemount, where Lacie had lived with her widowed mother. The home was a white Dutch Colonial Jimmy would have chosen if he’d been able to afford a house.

Mrs. Livermore was an older, more-lived-in version of the newspaper photo Jimmy’s lieutenant had given him. She gave him the name of a boy Lacie had gone to the Prom with and another young man she’d been friendly with during her Olympic training.

"Did either of these guys bother her after the relationship was over? Phone calls, showing up uninvited?"

"As far as I know they were still friends."

"Was either one at the funeral?"

"Tom was. Alan lives in New Jersey and wasn’t able to arrange for time off from work. He sent a lovely flower arrangement."

Tom Blanchard had a very good alibi, the best actually. He’d been at Camp Ripley training with the National Guard the day Lacie’s grave had been violated.

#

Shirley Evans kept giving Jimmy the come-on. She crossed her legs and her dress slid all the way up her silky thigh.

"Ain’t it bad enough she had to die so young and then somebody has to go and–-"

"Miss Evans . . ."

"That’s Shirley.

"Shirley. Can you tell me if Lacie had a boyfriend who came to see her."

"She didn’t have a boyfriend. Spent all her time at the track before she got sick. That’s what you gotta do if you’re a dedicated athlete. Do you have a girlfriend, Lieutenant Reese?"

"That’s Detective Reese. And no, I don’t date anybody special." She put her hand on his knee and smiled mischievously. If she kept this up, he was going to drag her off to the nearest broom closet and . . . Had to keep his mind on business. "Was there anybody who came to see her a lot before she died? Anybody, anybody at all?"

"Just Hal, but he visits all of the terminally ill patients.

He’s an obituary writer for the Gazette. If you’re thinking Hal Trask did this, you’re crazy! He’s just the quietest, meekest boy in Hennepin County . . ."

"Does he look like Rob Lowe?"

"Who’s Rob Lowe?"

"The guy on ‘West Wing.’"

"Oh, I don’t watch that."

"No other male visitors then?"

"Some of her Olympic friends, but they didn’t show up that often."

#

An obituary writer visiting the diseased before she died? Weird, very weird indeed. Jimmy got Hal Trask’s address from his editor at the Gazette, a pushy fellow named Kramer who didn’t want to give it to him at first. "We’re talking to everyone who knew Lacie, Mr. Kramer. I assure you Mr. Trask is not a suspect."

But he was. Jimmy took a little walk around his neighborhood just to get a sense of what Trask was like. Mrs. Benson across the street said she never saw him come out of the house and that there were strange odors emanating from his basement.

Jimmy rang the door bell and leaned on the porch railing to wait. It was loose and he almost fell off the stoop.

"Can I help you?" the man said. The fellow’s skin was as pale as a vampire and he smelled like formaldehyde. Jimmy hadn’t felt this spooked since the time his dad had taken him to see Invaders From the Black Lagoon when he was only six.

"Ah . . . I’m Detective Reese," Jimmy said, flashing his shield. "Here to talk to you about Lacie Livermore. I’m sure you’ve heard–-"

"Sorry about the smell," Trask said. "I’ve been working on one of my creatures."

"Creatures?" Jimmy said, reaching for his piece which he wore strapped to his back.

"I’m sorry. I guess you didn’t know. I do taxidermy in my spare time."

"May I come in, Mr. Trask. The nurses at Mary of Fatima said you knew–-"

"Certainly."

The kitchen was normal in every sense of the word. And clean, a lot cleaner than Jimmy’s kitchen, that was for sure. He was lucky if he got around to stacking the dishwasher once a week. They took seats around a yellow Formica table in the kitchen. The dude even had a centerpiece, a bunch of geraniums. "How well did you know Lacie Livermore, Mr. Trask?"

"Moderately well. I like to get to know the people I write about before they . . . pass. I refuse the assignment otherwise."

"You can afford that?"

"Taxidermy is very lucrative, Detective. I make between $325 to $1,000, depending on the job. More if the owner is persistent. I don’t like to do family pets; I don’t find them to be much of a challenge anymore, but if the price is right . . ."

"You say you knew Lacie moderately well. Yet you fit the description of a man the watchman at Oak Lawn saw hanging around the grave."

It seemed unlikely, but Jimmy swore Trask grew even more pale than he’d been when he’d answered the door. The man had to have an aversion to the sun. "I was at her funeral, but I never did visit her grave."

"Then you wouldn’t mind if I showed the watchman your picture."

#

Hal finished with Lacie that night. She looked almost as angelic as she had the last time he’d seen her alive. He’d been experimenting with various river-bottom clays for his molds and when he touched her, there was a definite give to her skin. He had thought he would go crazy removing her skin, but she’d talked to him throughout the grisly task. "You’re a brilliant artist," she said. "You and I can be together forever."

Where would he take her? When that detective showed the watchman his picture, he’d know who’d freed Lacie from her hoary prison.

Hal drove his car around to back door, then he wrapped Lacie in a blanket and carried her out to the trunk of his Honda. He’d hide her at his grandfather’s hunting cabin until this all blew over. What was that they said on the Discovery Channel? No body, no crime.

#

When the watchman identified Trask’s picture, Jimmy was able to get a judge to sign a warrant to search Trask’s house. One of the comedians at the station, Perry McCain went along to help. "I know this sucker did it," he told McCain. "He smelled like a mortician when I talked to him the first time."

"You say he’s a taxidermist, huh? You hear the one about the old woman who wanted her pet rabbits stuffed?"

"Nah, never heard that one."

"The joker asked if she wanted them mounted and she said, ‘no, just holding hands.’"

McCain rang the doorbell and they stood on the stoop for what seemed like an eternity before Trask finally answered the door. Today, he smelled like English Leather; he’d even acquired a Copper Tone tan.

Jimmy handed him the warrant. "The watchman identified you, Trask. We’re gonna need to search your house."

"I have that kind of face," Trask said. "Everybody thinks they know me."

The upper level of the little ranch house was a waste of time. What a neatnik; Jimmy hadn’t seen a bed that well-made since he’d spent six months in the National Guard. Every room had plants; every room shiny hard-wood floors, varnished to a high gloss. You’d think Martha Stewart lived here.

The basement was another story. Feathers and antlers and fur, lots of fur. A few finished mounts here and there. Scared the crap out of himself when he almost stepped on what he thought was a live snake, but Trask assured him that it was only Arnold, the boa constrictor.

McCain, for once, was more professional. He looked behind the jars on the shelves, probed behind the furnace, even reached up into the rafters, coming down with a handful of dust, always consulting a list of the items Lacey had been buried with. He found an anklet bracelet mixed in with a jar full of artificial eyes.

Once again, they sat at the yellow Formica table, Jimmy twirling the bracelet like a talisman. "You might as well tell us where she is, Hal. You’re going down no matter what, what with the watchman’s testimony and the bracelet."

"She gave me the bracelet as a keepsake."

"Come on, Trask," McCain said. "Gals don’t give guys ankle bracelets."

"And you said you barely knew her," Jimmy said. "Think about her mother. All the time I was with her, she was crying. Give her some peace of mind."

Trask would not confess, and Jimmy had been stretching it when he’d said they had enough evidence to send Trask up the river. The County Attorney wanted nothing to do with the case. "Find me her body," she’d barked.

Jimmy was in trouble with his lieutenant because he was spending so much time tailing Trask. Two months had gone by before he received a phone call in the middle of the night. Jimmy rubbed his eyes, checked the red numerals on his clock radio. It was Three A.M. "Reese here," he said.

"That ghoul is here again digging up another grave," a voice whispered.

"What are you talking about? Which ghoul?"

"That guy that dug up his girlfriend," the watchman at Oak Lawn said. "Tried to slip me a sleeping draft, but I poured it out."

"I’ll be right there," Jimmy said.

#

An hour later Jimmy and Trask sat across from each other in the interrogation room at the station. "Want to explain yourself, Hal?" Jimmy said. "I can understand why you might not be able to part with your girlfriend, but why the old man?" Trask had plundered the grave of one Sven Thormodsgaard, age eight-two.

Trask sat there poker-faced, crossing his arms across his chest. "I want my lawyer."

"Come on, Trask. We caught you red-handed. It’s only a matter of time before we find her."

"I said I want my lawyer."

Jimmy decided to run a bluff. "You want me to bring Mrs. Livermore in here; she’s right outside."

Bingo! Trask looked as though he’d just taken a punch to the kidney. "God, don’t do that; I’ll tell you where she is."

"Never would’ve got you if it hadn’t been for the old man," Jimmy said. "What was up with that?"

"Lacie was lonely . . . when I was away at work," Trask said. "I wanted Sven to keep her company."