“I don’t know whether to call a medical doctor or psychiatrist,” she said to Bailey, “but I refuse to call an exorcist.”
“Where’s Sally?”
“In the kitchen with Edna. By now my sister will have convinced herself that she, too, saw the apparition and that it had a forked tongue just like a snake.”
Edna cared about decor far more than did her sister, and so Martha lived with the consequences of Edna’s passion for all things Victorian: chesterfield sofas upholstered in midnight-blue mohair, side tables draped with velvet and crocheted overlays, étagères full of porcelain birds, floral-fabric walls in original William Morris patterns, everything trimmed with ornate gimp, tassels, fringes, lace, and swags.
Although the kitchen had touches of late-nineteenth-century style, it appeared more modern than the rest of the apartment because even Edna preferred gas and electric appliances to wood-burning iron stoves and hulking ice lockers. The most Victorian thing in this roomy space was Edna’s outfit, a faithful re-creation of actual day wear from the period, which her seamstress had made according to a drawing in a catalog published in that era: a lilac silk afternoon dress covered with white-spotted lilac chiffon, featuring a lace yoke with rucked silk, a matching hip basque, elbow-length pleated sleeves, and a pleated and gathered floor-length skirt.
Martha was so accustomed to Edna’s ways that most of the time she was hardly aware that her sister’s fashions were unusual, but once in a while, like now, she realized that these dresses might be more accurately described as costumes. Sitting at the breakfast table with Sally Hollander, whose self-chosen uniform consisted of black slacks and a simple white blouse, Edna looked eccentric, sweet and dear, pleasingly fanciful, but undeniably eccentric.
Declining an offer of coffee with or without brandy, Bailey sat at the table, across from Sally, and said, “Will you tell me what you saw?”
Previously, the housekeeper’s broad, freckled face had always appeared to be aglow with soft reflected firelight, her green eyes often merry but seldom less than amused. Her skin was ashen now, the fire banked in her eyes.
The tremor in her voice seemed genuine. “I was putting away the luncheon plates. The ones with the pierced rim and the roses. From the corner of my eye, I saw something … something quick and dark. At first it was a shadow, like a shadow, but not a shadow. It came from the kitchen into the butler’s pantry, went past me toward the door to the dining room. Tall, almost seven feet, very fast.”
Easing forward in her chair, arms on the table, Edna lowered her voice as if concerned that the forces of darkness might learn she was aware of them. “Some say this place is haunted by Andrew Pendleton himself, ever since he committed suicide back in the day.”
Leaning against a counter, Martha sighed, but no one noticed.
“Maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t,” Edna continued. “But even if 77 Shadow Street is as full of restless shades as any graveyard, this wasn’t one of them. Nothing as innocent as lingering spirits. Tell him, Sally.”
“God help me, I’m half afraid to talk about it,” the housekeeper said. “Talking about such things can be an invitation to them. Isn’t that what they say, Miss Edna? I don’t want to invite that thing back, whatever it was.”
“We know what it was,” Edna said.
Martha expected Bailey to glance at her knowingly, but he remained focused on the housekeeper. “You said it was like a shadow at first.”
Sally nodded. “It was ink-black. No details. But then I turned to look after it passed me … and I saw it as clear as I see you now. About eight feet away, turning toward me as if it hadn’t noticed me until it flew past and was surprised to see me there. Like a man but not a man. Something different about the shape of the head, something wrong, I can’t say for sure what. But no hair at all, no eyebrows. Skin as gray as lead. Even the eyes gray, no whites to them, and the irises black, black and deep like gun barrels.” She shuddered and resorted to her spiked coffee for comfort. Then: “He … it … it was lean but looked strong. It opened its mouth, those terrible gray lips, its teeth gray, too, and sharp. It hissed and it meant to bite me, I’m sure it did. I screamed, and it came at me so fast, faster than a cat or a striking snake, faster than anything.”
Although Martha remained determined not to be as credulous as Edna, neither her insulating skepticism nor her sensible pantsuit prevented a chill from prickling her spine. She told herself that what disturbed her was the change in Sally, this uncharacteristic claim of a supernatural experience, rather than the possibility that the encounter might have been real.
“Demonic,” Edna declared. “A creature of the Pit. No ordinary spirit.”
To the housekeeper, Bailey said, “But it didn’t bite you.”
She shook her head. “This sounds so weird … but as it came at me, it changed again, from something very real to just a black shape, and it flew past. I could feel it brushing past me.”
“And how did it leave the butler’s pantry?” Bailey asked.
“How did it leave? Well, just like that. Whoosh and gone.”
“Did it pass through a wall?”
“A wall? I don’t know. It was just gone.”
“Oh, walls mean nothing to demons,” Edna assured them.
“Demons,” Martha said derisively enough to make it clear she considered such talk nonsense.
Sally said, “I don’t know if it was any demon, ma’am. I didn’t conjure it, for sure. But it was something, all right. As real as me, it was. I don’t nip at a bottle when I’m working, and I didn’t hallucinate it.”
As earlier, a rumble arose from underfoot, and this time the Pendleton shook sufficiently to rattle glassware in cabinets and flatware in drawers. Dangling from a rack over the center work island, copper pans and pots swung on their hooks, although not enough to clang against one another.
The shaking persisted longer than previously, ten or fifteen seconds, and halfway through the tremors, Bailey pushed his chair back from the table, getting to his feet as though anticipating calamity.
Sally Hollander warily surveyed the kitchen, as though she expected that cracks might zigzag up its walls, and Martha stepped away from the counter when upper cabinet doors rattled behind her.
Seemingly amused by her companions’ alarm, toying girlishly with the rucked silk at the lace yoke of her dress, Edna said, “I spoke earlier with sweet Mr. Tran, and he’s quite sure these quakes are just because of bedrock blasting to carve out the foundation for that new high-rise on the east side of Shadow Hill.”
Tran Van Lung, who had legally Americanized his name to Thomas Tran, was the building superintendent. He lived in an apartment in the basement, next to the security center.
“No. That went on too long, much too long, for blast waves,” Bailey insisted. “And the first one I felt was in the pool room this morning, about four-fifteen. They wouldn’t be starting construction work at that hour.”
“Mr. Tran is the finest superintendent the Pendleton’s ever had,” Edna said. “He knows everything about the building. He can fix anything or knows who can, and he’s as trustworthy as anyone I’ve ever met.”
“I agree,” Bailey said. “But even Tom Tran can sometimes be operating on misinformation.”
When most young men of Bailey Hawks’s age squinted, they had but two or three small darts at the outer corners of their eyes. His years at war had stitched the memory of worry into his face so completely that when he was alarmed, his smooth skin folded into an array of pleats that aged him and gave him the aspect of a formidable man of fierce intentions.
When Bailey had sprung up from his chair, Martha Cupp glimpsed something even more revealing of his state of mind. Under