Top then turned his attention to Moira. He was 83 at the time but he didn't look a day over 82. Even so he was a charmer. He had a way with women. He was every girl's favorite grandfather.
He knew everything there was to know about life, and could explain it in ways that would confuse and irritate a sociologist. I should say that it wasn't so much what he knew but how he expressed it that was impressive. He was that way with any topic, from the profound to the profane. He could read aloud the nutrition facts on a box of cereal and you would feel that a mystery of the universe had revealed its secrets and you were enlightened. Book-learned professors might snicker at his philosophy, but those of us who had experienced the grassroots of life's versatile and various facets knew that Top was on to something quintessential. He knew what he was talking about.
Moira was charmed by him, but did she give two shits about his quirky intellectual musings on that walk back to the house? No, it was the reputed hauntings, and the murders that had set it all in motion, that captured her imagination; and by the time Moira and I were settled in a second-floor guest room and had returned to the extravagance of the living-room, Top knew what was uppermost in her mind.
This room had a lofty ceiling. At night the few lamps gave off a mustard yellow glow and made the Victorian furniture look like hard hairless creatures frozen in positions of lethargy, or of fear, depending on the topic under discussion. The rugs were a dark red with patterns that suggested the aftermath of a blood bath. Here and there were bronze idols from Asian myths, vessels bristling with incense sticks, gaudy prayer-wheels like little paper carousels, attached to the bottom frames of water-color paintings of misty sugarloaf mountains in China, captioned with chicken-scratch lettering in vertical rows that I supposed were poems.
Top did a good job creating this atmosphere. His live-in servants, two elderly widows who shared a ground-floor room, spent the afternoons dusting and polishing all this stuff and replacing the noxious-looking flowers with fresh specimens. He had mentioned that his sister hated his taste in decor.
The smells of an exotic cuisine were drifting up to our noses when Moira, sitting next to me on a scrolled-arm love seat, asked Top point blank to tell her if the house was haunted.
True to his character, Top had changed into a dark grey robe belted at the waist, had put on a turban and sandals. He answered her while lounging in a similar love seat, a leg bent under the other and a hand absently rubbing an ankle. "A haunting," he said, "is the personification of a trauma." (I had heard this spiel many times.) "It touches us at a deep emotional level and engages our psyche. This results in visual and auditory phenomena that might possibly be a revealing of true entities, or might just be illusions constructed by our excited minds. In either case, a haunting is something we truly experience."
"Who are the ghosts?" asked Moira bluntly. She wanted to get to the heart of the matter and just never mind the explanations. "Are they the parents? Or the daughter?"
Top leaned toward us, very serious. "Oh, the daughter, of course. Indeed. She is the one who is so restless and seeks vengeance against her betrayer, her lover who slit her throat out there in the dry summer woods while she stood staring down at the bloody remains of her victims. Parents don't seek revenge against their offspring, they just lie tormented in their graves. But Alicia! You should see her!"
Moira gasped excitedly and scrunched up against me. "Will I? You think I might? When? Tonight?"
Top sat back, beaming with enthusiasm. "Of course. You are certain to. Indeed. After he arrives. Later. In the deeper hours of the night." This was what had my interest. "Are you talking about Johnny Bee?" I asked.
Top turned his hollowed-out eyes to me and let me dwell a moment on their curious glimmer. "You remember that night in Laramie, after your initiation, when the Bee Man came to the house? He believed you to be his challenger, an Undertaker pulling a ruse."
I had told Moira about the fight, so I just said, "I straightened his ass out on that deal." Top chuckled. "And so did the real Undertaker the next day," he said. "I lost a K, but in you I gained a good solid Roadent. No, it's not Johnny Bee who's coming by tonight, but the Undertaker's step-father. You and Moira will find him interesting. But more to our purposes, it will be Alicia who finds him the MOST interesting one of all."
Moira sat up rigidly straight. "He killed her?" For dramatic effect Top linked his fingers and stared up at the high shadowy ceiling.
I listened to the sounds coming from the kitchen. The food was being emptied from pots and placed in bowls and saucers. The two widows were chatting in muted voices. For them this was just another in a long series of orchestrated drama; Top's occasional theatrics that invariably ended in drunken slumber with nothing to show for it but hangovers in the morning and discussions over coffee about what is real and what isn't. But I had a feeling that this time...
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