Free Hanging by a Thread by Monica Ferris Page B

“A dream, obviously.”
    “It wasn’t a dream,” said Martha. “I was wide awake, I’d been wakened by the bump. But there also weren’t any weird lights or footsteps or a chill breeze, or any of the usual stuff of ghost stories. And it wasn’t my father, either,” she said with a little sniff, forestalling Godwin’s next sly suggestion.
    So instead Godwin said, “How about you, Bershada? Do you have a ghost story?”
    “Well, actually, I do. Only mine’s different from Martha’s, I didn’t know it was a ghost. I thought it was an usher.”
    “At a wedding ?” said Martha, scandalized.
    “No, no,” said Bershada, laughing. “At the Guthrie!”
    “Oh, him !” said Godwin. “You saw Richard Miller!”
    “Yes, that’s the name. Have you seen him, too?”
    “No, but I’ve heard about him. When did you see him?”
    “Oh, this was years ago. My husband’s parents took Mac and me to see Amadeus, and this usher kept walking up and down the aisle, blocking our view. The ushers are supposed to go out to the lobby during a performance, so it was annoying. He didn’t seem to be looking for someone in particular, like you’d expect if it was an emergency or something. And he didn’t seem interested in the play, either. He was just kind of observing the audience. I could see he was young, maybe only in his late teens, and he had a big mole on one cheek, very noticeable. I knew he was an usher because he had the sports coat they wear, with the insignia on the pocket?” She made a gesture over her left breast. “So during the intermission we complained to one of the other ushers, and he laughed and said we’d seen Richard Miller, who was an usher back in the sixties who committed suicide.”
    “How did this usher kill himself?” asked Betsy. “Hang himself from a balcony rail?”
    “ Betsy !” said Emily.
    “He didn’t kill himself in the theater at all,” said Godwin. “He did it in the Sears parking lot on Lake Street.”
    “That old place?” said Bershada. She explained to Betsy, “It’s closed now, has been for a long, long time, but the building is still there, and the parking lot. It’s a big building, very nice-looking in that art-deco way. They keep talking about doing something with it, but haven’t so far. Anyway, you’d think he’d haunt that building.”
    “Maybe he does,” said Martha. “Only there’s nobody around to see him.”
    “Or he haunts the parking lot,” said Comfort. “I can just hear the warnings: ‘Don’t park in row three, slot nineteen, or you’ll come back to find a see-through stranger in your backseat.’ ”
    Emily giggled uncomfortably, but Alice cleared her throat in a disparaging way.
    Godwin said, “Instead, for some reason, he came back to the Guthrie and he gets in the way of customers.” He frowned and said, “Maybe that’s what Paul Schmitt was doing, not haunting the house he died in, but a place where something sad happened.”
    “Or a place where he did something wicked,” said Carol.
    “What do you mean?” asked Martha.
    “Well, suppose he found out about Angela and Foster and murdered Angela. True love can turn to hate in a wink of an eye, you know. I remember wondering right after Angela was murdered if maybe Paul hadn’t done it.”
    Godwin objected, “Well, if that’s a cause for haunting, you’d think Paul would haunt Foster Johns’s office. After all, Foster murdered Paul.”
    Alice said, “Nobody knows that for sure. Everyone’s been saying how nice Paul was. Well, suppose he wasn’t nice, despite his smiles. Suppose someone were to get serious about looking into his and Angela’s deaths.” She raised an eyebrow at Betsy. “I think it’s possible there might be other suspects.”
    “You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,” said Bershada with a frown.
    “You shouldn’t make saints of people who don’t deserve it!” said Alice. “If Martha is right and Paul was a jealous man, and it is not at all uncommon