999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [322]
He looked around. “Someone else?”
“Yes, a little here, please,” requested Dare.
Morna moved to his end of the table.
“He met Riga at a music hall,” Case resumed. “She was a dancer. Her parents were Romanian immigrants, Gypsies. She was only sixteen.”
“Yes, that’s young,” agreed Dare. He moistened the tip of his finger and placed it on top of a large croissant crumb, pressed gently down, and then lifted the fallen crumb into his mouth. Morna was leaning over his cup. “And so how did he kill her?” Dare asked.
“Suffocation.”
Dare emitted a yelp.
Morna gasped, her hand clapped over her mouth. Somehow missing Dare’s cup, she had poured hot coffee onto his lap.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!”
Dare dabbed at the stain with his napkin.
“It’s all right, love. I mean, really. Nothing to it. Not at all.”
“You see, Morna?” said Case. “He forgives you.”
She turned and met his odd, steady stare in silence; then she turned back away and uttered softly, “I know.” While she filled Dare’s cup, her green gaze lifted up and for one intense moment met and held Trawley’s.
“We’re all fine here now, Morna,” Case told her.
She nodded and moved off toward the kitchen.
“Getting back to the history of the house,” resumed Case. He laid it out briefly: Built in 1937. Then in 1952 the murder of Riga and the death of Quandt himself minutes afterwards, apparently by his own hand. Ownership passed to a son, Regis Quandt, aged twelve when the tragedy occurred, and taken to live with Quandt’s brother, Michael. Regis died when he was only twenty, mansion ownership passed to Michael and then finally to Michael’s son, Paul Quandt. Meantime, the mansion had been put up for sale, but without success, and in 1954, and over the course of the next twenty years, was leased out any number of times, with the leases always broken through departure or death, including a period late in the fifties when the house had been occupied by a contemplative order of nuns who experienced an outbreak of “possession” hysteria reminiscent of three hundred years before among the nuns at the convent of Loudun in France. The nun in charge was found hanged from a wooden beam. “That was in 1958,” said Case. From then on, he explained, the house was unoccupied until 1984, when Paul Quandt, wealthy already from inheritance and now a historian of some note, moved in with his wife and three young children. Like others, they experienced the haunting phenomena, in particular deafening hangings on the outer walls. “And then there were other things …” said Case, his voice trailing off. He left it hanging. In 1987, he then recounted, the unnerving manifestations ceased, and so things remained until 1990, when the Quandts moved to Italy, decided they liked it there, and put the island and the mansion up for sale. But the house’s reputation had outlived its reign of peace.
“So far,” ended Case, “the tragic words of this ghastly gospel.”
“So it all goes back to the wife being suffocated,” said Dare.
“That’s right,” agreed Case.
“And so the wife is the ghost, is that the plot? Heavy breathing and moaning in the hallway at night? Perhaps the sound of someone tapping a pipe against his teeth?”
Subtly, Freeboard’s middle finger lifted up in Dare’s direction.
“I have no information that Quandt smoked a pipe, Mr. Dare,” said Case, looking mildly at sea.
“Oh, you’re saying that it’s Quandt who haunts the place?”
“Perhaps so.” Case reached out and plucked a chocolate from a small silver tray. “Most of the victims,” he imparted, “have been women.”
Dare paled. “Victims? What victims? You mean dead people?”
“Quite.”
Freeboard sighed and then shifted in her chair.
“Are we going to talk about this forever?”
The Realtor’s eyes were glazed over with boredom.
“And of course, all these women died of fright,” Dare said tightly.
“Only one. Three were suicides,” said Case. “Two went insane.”
The author turned his head and stared archly at Freeboard.