Hole: A Ghost Story Read online

  “Dailyville Police Department.”

  Hank opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out. His voice had gotten stuck in his neck, a jagged chicken bone of grief.

  “Can I help you?”

  He cleared his throat and tried again, “Yes. I… this is Hank Stanford at 12 Birch Drive. I need to… uh, get someone out here.”

  “What’s the nature of your call, Mr. Stanford?”

  “My wife… Mary… she’s dead.”

  “She’s dead?” Betraying a little surprise.

  “Yes… she’s in the tub.”

  “She’s in the bathtub?”

  “She killed herself.” His lips started bucking and tears came to his eyes, but he managed to swallow back his emotions. The dispatcher asked if he’d called 911. No. She asked if he was sure she was dead. “Yes, I’m sure,” he snapped, his voice cracking. “She’s already cuh-cuh-cold. The tub’s full of…” He squeezed his eyes shut. “The tub’s full of blood, and she’s just lying in it. She cut her fucking’s arms open!” Hank sobbed while the dispatcher continued to press him for information.

  “Sir, I want you to go outside and wait for police officers to arrive. I’ve got them en route. Don’t touch anything in the area where the... uh, where your wife is.” She almost said “the body” before she caught herself.

  “Okay,” Hank sniffed. He hung up and crossed the kitchen.

  When he was outside on the patio, he made his second call. His business partner Travis answered on the first ring. “What’s cookin’, big guy?” Travis asked. He had caller ID. Hank could hear Travis’s kids in the background, yelling happily.

  Hank told him Mary was dead, staring numbly at the cornfield across the road.

  “What?” Travis yelled.

  “She’s dead.”

  “She’s dead?”

  “I think she killed herself.”

  “Oh God!”

  Hank could hear Travis’s wife Becca asking “who was dead” in the background. Travis told her to shut up. They talked for a while after that, but Hank didn’t remember what passed between them, because he vacillated between hysteria and blubbering. When Becca realized they were talking about Mary, she screamed.

  Travis had just hung up, promising to be there in one minute—“Just try to keep it together ‘til I get there, dude!” -- when the police cruiser pulled into the driveway, its lights flashing silently, tires grinding over the gravel with a sound like someone chewing breakfast cereal.

  Hank walked across the patio, swaying like a drunkard, and flopped down in a deck chair. He was waiting with his hands clasped between his knees when the officer strode up the sidewalk to meet him, adjusting his holster.

  “Henry Stanford?” the police officer asked. He was a younger man, maybe thirty, in good physical condition, with short-cropped blonde hair and a square face.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You called the police department?”

  Squinty, suspicious blue eyes. He watched Hank warily. Did the young cop expect him to jump up with a butcher knife, laugh maniacally, and declare: “Yes, I killed her! And now I shall dispatch you as well! Bwah-hah-hah!”

  “Yes,” Hank said, looking at the man with red-rimmed eyes.

  “You want to show me where your wife is, Mr. Stanford?”

  Hank heard the gravel in his driveway grinding again. Another police cruiser pulling in.

  He didn’t want to take the officer inside. He didn’t want to walk back up those stairs, lead the young man to the dead wife lying in his master bath.

  “Okay,” he said.

  Call Three:

  “Steve? This is Hank.” He was back outside. The sun was hanging just a little over the horizon now. His head felt like an overfilled balloon, swollen so tight it was about to pop.

  “Hank, what’s the matter?” Mary’s brother asked, alarmed.

  “It’s Mary.”

  “Oh, God! What happened?”

  Call Six:

  “Mom? Mom, it’s me… Mom, Mary killed herself!”

  Call Twelve… Call Fifteen… Call Seventeen…

  Finally, his cell phone went dead. Travis, who’d arrived just minutes after the second police officer, let him borrow his Nokia, and Hank finished calling everyone he could think of, everyone who needed to be called.

  By the time he’d finished calling all their friends and relatives, his voice was a rasp and night had mired the cornfield in tarry shadow. The day had passed like his wife, sudden and irrevocably, and with it the temperature.

  A cool, low-pressure front was rolling in. Hank stood shivering on the patio as the police and the coroner did their thing upstairs. The moon rose over the field, bloated and yellow.

  “I was going to tell her tonight,” Hank said to his partner Travis, his voice low and hoarse. “I was going to confess everything, try to make things right again.” He laughed without mirth. “If I couldn’t fix it, I was going to pack my bags and leave. How’s that for timing? A day late and a dollar short, huh?”

  Travis leaned toward him and murmured, “You need to keep that shit on the down low, bro. You say something like that to the cops, it’s going to open a whole can of worms for you.”

  Hank looked into his friend’s eyes, not really comprehending, but he nodded because he trusted Travis’s counsel.

  They’d become fast friends in college, he and Travis, had shared a dorm room, helped one another study for the bar. Travis, who looked like a young Richard Dreyfuss, had introduced Hank and Mary twenty years ago, stood by his side at his wedding, was even the one to suggest they open a practice of their own rather than work for some corporate law firm.

  Hank wasn’t sure what Travis was trying to imply. Keep what shit on the down low? But his thoughts were a scrambled mess, so he just nodded.

  “Mr. Stanford, you want coffee?” Brandon asked, walking out onto the patio with two steaming mugs in his hands. Brandon had arrived an hour ago. Travis had called him.

  Hank’s legal assistant was a small man with a round earnest face and short black hair. “Here, you drink,” he said, pushing the coffee cup into Hank’s hands. “You need. Make you feel better.” His Vietnamese accent was ridiculously thick, but after years of employment as their secretary and general go-get-it guy, Hank had no problems understanding him.

  And Mary’s parents were coming, too. God, he couldn’t deal with Mary’s mother tonight!

  Hank had a sneaking suspicion Harriet Klegg was going to blame him for her daughter’s suicide. She’d probably accuse him of killing Mary and staging a suicide scene. But when Mary’s parents arrived, parking behind all the cars in the driveway, Harriet leapt out of her husband’s late model LeMans and ran straight for him, arms open wide.

  “Oh, Hank!” she cried. “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry!”

  She squashed his face to her bosom. He tried not to breathe in her body odor as he hugged her back, coffee sloshing from his cup. She always smelled like old woman: spoiled sweat and bleach and cheap floral perfume, the kind you could buy at the Dollar Store called Smells Like...

  He was so shocked by her sympathy, he fumbled for words. He’d been rehearsing denials in his head since he called her.

  “Oh, honey, you must feel so horrible. This is all my fault. When Mary came to the house I knew there was something bothering her, but she was never one to talk about her feelings, was she? I told her, ‘Mary,’ I told her, ‘You can’t keep everything bottled up inside you. You have to get whatever it is that’s bothering you off your chest.’ But I didn’t press her. You know I’m not the type to meddle. And now-- O-ooh!” She exploded into a gale of tears.

  Mary’s father was trundling across the driveway toward the patio, wheezing and dragging his oxygen tank behind him. Hank broke away from his mother-in-law and went to help.

  “I got it, son,” he gasped. Jim limped to one of the patio chairs and collapsed, his cheeks sunk in, his mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. “You tell me…” wheeze! “What hap
pened…” wheeze! “To my little girl, Henry Stanford.” He’d never called Hank anything other than Henry. Not in all the years that Hank had been married to his daughter.

  So Hank told his in-laws how he’d found his wife—their only daughter—dead in the tub. It was probably the twentieth time he’d told it. After the sixth time, he’d quit crying in the middle of the telling. The eighth time, he didn’t feel anything at all. But it was okay: Jim and Harriet did enough crying for him.

  Brandon went inside to fetch the Kleggs some coffee, but retreated back outside, his eyes wide. “Oh, no! They coming--!”

  In his dismay, he forgot his English. He stuttered something to Travis in Vietnamese, looking over his shoulder in distress.

  A moment later, the coroner and his assistant rolled Mary’s body through the door on a stretcher. She was zipped inside a black body bag. At the sight of her, Hank’s legs gave out.

  Travis and Brandon tried to catch him but they weren’t fast enough to keep him from hitting the ground. He went on his knees, hunched forward like he was getting ready to pray.

  “Oh, God, Mary--! No--!” Hank moaned.

  In his agony, he started punching his fist into the brick patio deck. The pain in his knuckles distracted him from the pain in his chest. Cursing, he hit the ground again, busting his knuckles open, and leaving four red commas of blood on the paving stones.

  Travis and Brandon tried to haul him to his feet but he pushed their hands away. Travis did manage to catch hold of his arm before he could punch the bricks again, maybe shatter the bones in his hand.

  Jim Klegg put his face in his palms at the sight of his daughter’s body bag, his shoulder’s shaking. His wife just stood with her hands clasped together, looking angry and embarrassed. Her lips were pressed together in a thin white line.

  Police officers followed the stretcher out. They idled near the doorway, looking uncomfortable, as the family gasped and cried out. The coroner and his assistant didn’t stop. Hank allowed Travis and Brandon to heft him from the deck, and he followed the stretcher as they rolled Mary’s body to the hearse and loaded her inside.

  Across the road, the Halperns had come out into their yard to watch. Hank’s neighbors, dressed in matching white shorts and striped shirts, stood side by side, trying to look solemn, but Hank wasn’t fooled. He was only surprised they hadn’t worked up the nerve to cross the road yet.

  At least they have something new to gossip about the next time Ed hosts poker night at their house, Hank thought.

  “We need you to step out of the way, sir,” the coroner’s assistant said gently, taking Hank’s arm and leading him from the back of the hearse. Travis took him from there, and the assistant slid into the vehicle with a sorry-for-your-loss that actually sounded pretty sincere.

  Hank watched as the hearse pulled from the driveway, then returned to the patio and flopped down in a chair. The last of his strength had run out of him. He was completely empty now.

  Detective Rames approached. He was the third police officer on the scene, a tall heavyset guy with old fashioned sideburns and a stubbly double chin.

  Rames expressed his condolences, then took the rest of the information he needed for his reports, jotting down Hank’s answers in a pocket notebook. He kept the interview pretty informal. Have you signed the release for the autopsy? the detective asked. Hank nodded. He’d done that earlier, at the dining room table. Did he know what funeral home he planned to use? Morgan’s Funeral Home, on Catherine Street. Mary had mentioned it once, when her aunt died. “This is a really nice funeral home,” she’d said. “I want my service here, if anything happens to me.” That was several years ago, but Hank remembered.

  Detective Rames regarded Hank sympathetically. “Morgan’s is nice. We had my mother’s funeral there. Listen, Mr. Stanford, I know all the platitudes in the world don’t amount to a fart in the wind at a time like this,” he said, “But we’ll get through this together. If you need anything, even if you just need to talk, give me a call. I left my card on your kitchen counter, or you can come see me at the station.”

  Hank nodded. He’d expected accusations, recriminations: It’s your fault she’s dead, Henry Stanford. You know it, and I know it. We all know it, so why don’t you just confess and save yourself the embarrassment? You must have been some kind of shitty husband. Most wives just ask for a divorce, but that wasn’t good enough for your old lady. She had to slice open her forearms in the bathtub. That’s kind of like saying, “Forget separation! I can’t abide being in the same world as you!”

  The detective’s kindness flabbergasted Hank. It made the night seem even more unreal.

  Rames got everyone’s name and phone number, in case he needed to contact anyone later, then bid them all good night. He walked to his unmarked car, hitching up the back of his brown dress pants.

  One by one, the law enforcement officers departed. Harriet and Jim left shortly after. They would have stayed longer, Harriet explained, but Jim wasn’t doing so good. He needed to get home and take a breathing treatment. This was all just a bit too much for him, poor dear.

  Hank noted with growing distaste just how… smug she seemed to be about all of this. Almost triumphant. As if Mary had finally proven what an utter failure she had been-- to her parents, to her husband, to the whole wide world.

  Hank pictured himself punching the woman right in the mug. The image flashed in his mind so vividly his entire body went stock still, seized up like an engine that had thrown a rod, for fear of actually doing it-- just cocking back his bloody fist and driving it into his mother-in-law’s seamed old lady mouth. Not for his sake, but for his wife’s.

  If there was any blame left to go around, this harridan deserved a lion’s share of the remainder. Hank couldn’t count the times he’d found Mary crying in some private spot in their home. Always, it was over her so-called mother’s latest acrimonious tirade.

  It would feel so good to lay her out on the patio, but out of respect, he did nothing of the sort. His parents had raised him better. Instead, he smiled and nodded and squeezed his hands into fists, his scabby knuckles cracking open. Hank accepted her hug and a few more of her self-satisfied apologies.

  “We’ll be at home. Call me with the arrangements. And, if you need anything, of course. Anything at all.”

  Harriet waved to him as she slipped behind the wheel of the LeMans, her face doughy and piggish in the sallow glow of the car’s dome light. She didn’t help her husband cross the driveway, though his oxygen cart was bouncing back and forth over the stones and he was obviously laboring for breath.

  Finally, it was just him and his partner Travis and their secretary Brandon. They sat quietly under the stars, listening to the wind rustle through the cornfield across the road. Moths swarmed in a wavering globe around the patio light. Crickets filled the night air with their screechy symphony.

  “Do you want to come stay at my place tonight?” Travis asked. “You know we got the extra bed.”

  “I don’t know,” Hank murmured.

  “I don’t think you should stay here tonight.”

  “Mmm.”

  Hank looked up at his house, all the windows lit from within, their amber light deceptively inviting. It was no mansion, but it was a fine home. Too big for just the two of them really, but it was a case of love at first sight for Mary, so he’d bought it. It had cost him eighty grand back in the day, was worth twice that now.

  They’d made love in every single room of the house when they moved in, Hank recalled. Even the utility room.

  Silly newlywed games.

  He’d tried his best to give her a good life. Even when things got rough—and he went outside his marriage to fill the sucking hole that had opened up inside their relationship—he never stopped caring for her, never stopped trying to make her happy, never stopped providing for her.

  Material things, he thought bitterly.

  Hank looked down at his hands. Rubbed dried blood from his abraded knuckles.

&nb
sp; He ducked his eyes, not because of the pain in his knuckles, but because he was afraid he would see his wife’s shadow move across one of those windows, like it had so many other nights while he sat out here on the patio smoking, back before he gave up the cancer sticks.

  “No,” he said finally. “If it’s all the same to you, I think I want to stay here tonight. I have papers to go through. Steve’s on his way, too. You know Mary’s younger brother. I need to be here when he gets in. Also, I probably… need to clean up the bathroom. I can’t leave it like it is. Mary always kept a spotless house.”

  9.

  “I really tried to reach her when things headed south… I did everything I could think of to get through to her,” Hank said, as if he were speaking to himself. “When we were younger, it wasn’t so hard to make it work. Our marriage, I mean. To keep things running smooth. It was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job, but I didn’t care. I loved her, and she loved me. When you’re young, it seems like you have your whole life ahead of you. We thought we had plenty of time to work out all the kinks, you know. But lately… God, I was so tired of dragging that door open, and Mary on the other side, always pulling it back shut on me. I kind of gave up for a little while. I needed a break. And now look. Look at this mess. It’s all my fault, isn’t it?”

  Steve Klegg sat on the sofa across from Hank, a cup of coffee in his right hand, a cigarette in his left. He was a lanky man with thin blond hair, his face a cratered battleground where teenage hormones had waged war with his complexion. His cigarette unspooled blue-grey threads of smoke as he listened.

  When Hank fell silent, and his eyes turned toward Steve’s, he found an angry expression on his brother-in-law’s face.

  “I can tell one thing right now,” Mary’s brother said in a clipped voice, “There’s nothing you could have done different that would have changed anything. As terrible as it sounds for me to say it, this was coming for a long time.”

  Hank laughed bitterly. “You don’t know the whole story,” he replied.

  “No, you don’t know the whole story!” Steve insisted. He took a drag and blew the smoke out. “This isn’t the first time Mary tried to kill herself. She did it once before, when she was eighteen. It was pills that time. I found her unconscious in her bed, and Dad called 911. They took her to the hospital and pumped her stomach. Mom was in Alabama with Dean, helping with his kids. We called her and told her what happened, and you know what she said? She asked if Mary was okay, and when we said yes, it looked like she was going to be fine, she said, ‘Well then, I’ll be home when I said I’d be home.’ I bet Mary never told you that, did she?”