Alfred Hitchcock (editor) - Alfred Hitchcock Presents: 16 Skeletons from My Closet

Detectives should not be required to apprehend ghosts. It simply takes too much time. Moreover, though clothes may make the man, there's far more to a ghost than his bed sheet.

I do not believe in ghosts. Perhaps I do not believe in ghosts because I refuse to believe in ghosts and my mind rejects the possibility and seeks other explanation. In the Troy affair such explanation, for me, involved death-wish, hallucination, guilt complex, retribution, self-punishment and dual personality, but there again I am out of my ken: I am not a psychiatrist, I am a private detective. There are those who disagree with my conclusions, and you may be one of those. So be it, then. All I can do is render the events just as they occurred, beginning with that bright-white afternoon in January when my secretary ushered Miss Sylvia Troy into my office.

"Miss Sylvia Troy," said my secretary and departed.

"I'm Peter Chambers," I said. "Won't you sit down?"

She was small, quite good-looking, very feminine, about thirty. Close-cut wavy russet-red hair was capped about a smooth round face in which enormous dark-brown eyes would have been beautiful except for a flaw in expression almost impossible to put into words. There is only one word - haunted! - and that word, of course, is susceptible to so many different interpretations. Her eyes were far away, gone, out of her, not part of her, remote and lost. She remained standing while I, still seated behind my desk, squirmed uneasily.

"Please sit down," I said in as cordial a tone as I could muster within the embarrassment of trying to avoid those peculiarly-luminous, strangely-isolated, frightened eyes.

"Thank you very much," she said and sat in the chair at the side of my desk. She had a soft lovely voice, almost a trained voice as a professional singer's voice may be termed trained: it was round-voweled, resonant, beautifully-pitched, very feminine, melodious. She was wearing a red wool coat with a little black fur collar and she was carrying a black patent-leather handbag. She opened the handbag, extracted three hundred dollars, snapped shut the bag, and placed the money on my desk. I looked at it, but did not touch it.

"Not enough?" she said.

"I beg your pardon?" I said.

"The way you're looking at it."

"Looking at what?" I said.

"The money. Your fee. I'm sorry, but I can't afford any more."

"I'm not looking at it in any special way, Miss Troy. I'm just looking at it. Three hundred dollars may be enough or not enough - depending upon what you want of me."

"I want you to lay a ghost."

"What?"

"Please, sir, Mr. Chambers," she said, "I'm deadly serious."

"A ghost -"

"A ghost who has already killed one person and threatens to kill two others."

I directed my squirming to seeking in my pockets and finding a cigarette. I lit it and I said, "Miss Troy, the laying of ghosts is not quite my department. If this so-called ghost of yours has killed anyone, then you've come to the wrong place. There are constituted authorities, the police -"

"I cannot go to the police."

"Why not?"

"Because if I tell my story to the police I would be incriminating myself and my two brothers in..." She stopped.

"In what?"

"Murder."

There was a pause. She sat, limply; and I smoked, nervously.

Then I said, "Do you intend to tell me this story?"

"I do."

"Won't that be just as incriminating -"

"No, no, not at all," she said. "I must tell you because something must be done, because somebody - you, I hope - must help. But if you repeat what I tell you to the police, I will simply deny it. Since there is no proof, and since I would deny what you might repeat, nobody would be incriminated."

It was coming around to my department. People in trouble are my department. Had there been no mention of a ghost, it would have been completely and familiarly in my department. But it was sufficiently in my department for me to tap out my cigarette in an ashtray, pull the money over to my side of the desk, and say, "All right, Miss Troy, let's have it."

"It begins about a year ago. November, a year ago."

"Yes," I said.

"There are - or were - four of us in the family."

"Four in the family," I said.

"Three brothers and myself. Adam was the oldest. Adam Troy was fifty when he died."

"And the others?"

"Joseph was thirty-six. Simon is thirty-two. I am twenty-nine."

"You say Joseph was thirty-six?"

"My brother Joseph killed, himself - supposedly killed himself - three weeks ago."

"Sorry," I said.

"And now if I may - just a little background."

"Please," I said.

"Adam, so much older than any of us, was sort of father to all of us. Adam was a bachelor, rich and successful - he always had a knack for making money - while the rest of us" - she shrugged - "when it came to earning money, we were no shining lights. Joseph was a shoe-salesman, Simon is a drug clerk, and I'm a nightclub performer and, I must confess, a pretty bad one at that."

"Nightclub performer. Interesting."

"I do voices, you know? I used to be a ventriloquist. Now I'm a mimic; imitations, that sort of thing. Nothing great. I get by."

"And Adam?" I said. "What did Adam do?"

"He was a real-estate broker, and a shrewd investor in the stock market. He was a stodgy stingy man - which is probably why he never got married. He was like a father to us but, actually, he never helped us with money unless it was an emergency. But advice - plenty. And criticism - plenty. I can't say he was bad to us, but he wasn't really good to us. I hope I'm making myself clear."

"Yes. Very clear, Miss Troy."

"Now about the wills."

"Wills?" I said.

"Last wills and testaments. We all have like it's called reciprocal wills. If one dies, whatever he leaves is divided amongst the rest of us. I'm sure you know about reciprocal wills."

"Yes, of course."

"All right. Now last year, Adam made a real big win in the stock market and he suggested that we take a vacation together, a winter vacation, and that he would pay for all of it. A couple of weeks of skiing, fun, out-of-doors, up in Vermont. Two weeks in a winter wonderland, you know?"

I nodded.

"We, the rest of us, Joseph, Simon, and I - we arranged for those two weeks - the two middle weeks in November - and we all went up to a lodge at Mt. Killington in the Green Mountains of Vermont." She shuddered and was silent. Then she said, "I don't know how it began. Maybe we all had it in our minds, maybe that guilt was like a poison in all of us, but it was Joseph who said it first."

"Said what, please?"

"Said to get rid of Adam. Adam was upstairs sleeping and the three of us were sitting around downstairs in front of a big roaring fireplace, drinking, maybe getting a little drunk, when Joseph put out the suggestion and we were with him so fast it was like all of us said it together. I don't want to blame anyone. I say all three of us have the blame together. None of us ever had any money, real money, and all of a sudden it came to us, that we could have just that, real money, while we were still young enough to enjoy it." She shuddered again and put her hands over her face. She spoke through her hands. "From here I'd like to go real quick. Please?"

"Okay," I said.

Her hands dropped to her lap. "Next day, dressed warmly in ski suits, we went out on an exploring adventure, up into the mountains. Way up, high, Adam was standing near a crevice, a ravine, about a two thousand foot drop, with a little narrow river running on bottom. Joseph came up behind him, shoved, and Adam fell. That's all. He fell. All the way. There were like echoes coming back, and then - nothing. When we returned, we reported it. We said he had slipped and fallen. The police went up to investigate, there was an inquest, and that was it."