Hide and Seek by Jack Ketchum

half-committed to the girl and I didn't know a thing about her except physical things and what you could deduce in the space of a couple weeks, some of which wasn't very good. So what was I getting involved in? She was rich, for god's sake. I was her summer playmate.
    It wouldn't be hard to get pretty annoyed with me myself.
     
    It seemed like a good time to tie one on. I ordered another round for us.
     
    "That's right, get a little sloppy. You'll feel better."
     
    "Do me a favor, George."
     
    "Sure."
     
    "If she ever pushes me off a cliff somewhere, kick the shit out of her?"
     
    "Be glad to."
     
    We drank our beers and watched the Caribou fill up steadily with the after-work crowd. I was always interested to see the mix. Jeans, dirty T-shirts, overalls, business suits from Sears. We got salesmen, fishermen, laborers. A smattering of women. All kinds of people.
    Bars up here don't cater to a single type of crowd the way they do in

the cities. There's not enough clientele for that. Bar life is about as democratic as we get.
     
    "Jim Palmer was in yesterday. We were talking about you."
     
    "Me? I hardly know the guy."
     
    "Well, not about you exactly. I mentioned that your friend had seen lights over at the Crouch place. Jimmie did all the contracting on the place, remember? Anyhow, he says there's nobody there now. So it must have been kids."
     
    "I guess."
     
    "Found out a few things, though."
     
    "Like what?"
     
    He settled back in the high-back chair and sipped the head off a fresh-poured beer.
     
    "Well, for one thing, that doctor left scared."
     
    "Scared?"
     
    "According to Palmer. Says he was up there maybe a month before the old guy left the place, because there was some patch-up that needed doing on the front porch, but the doc wouldn't let him bother with it.
    Had to go down into the basement instead to seal up a hole in the wall.
    Big hole. Said it looked as though somebody'd been whacking away at it with a sledgehammer. He couldn't figure it. Said the doc was a pretty weird guy. But he could understand him wanting it patched up again.
    The draft was fierce."
     
    "In the basement?"
     
    "Sure. Palmer says that in a couple of places the foundation's sitting right beside some open spaces in the seawall. Tunnels. Erosion or whatever. Said that whole stretch of coast is honeycombed with 'em. So you open up one of those spaces and the wind runs right in from the sea. Anyway, he closed it up. I told him about our little excursion out that way when we were kids."
     
    "I still don't get it. The draft was what scared him? What was he, afraid of summer colds?"
     
    "Jimmie says he doesn't really know what it was. Maybe he was afraid the whole house was going to slide down into those tunnels someday. You know, the way they go out in California. But that cellar is sunk in solid rock. He had no problem there. No, hecouldn'tfigure what it was."
     

"Ben and Mary's ghosts."
     
    "Could be."
     
    "You sound like you've got more."
     
    "I do. Did you know they were imbeciles?"
     
    "You mean crazy?"
     
    "No. Imbeciles. It's a pretty ugly story, actually. It seems that when the bank called in that mortgage money they had a town meeting about it. See, all Ben knew was farming, and he was pretty bad at that. But there was no possibility of either of them doing anything else for a living. So somebody came up with the bright idea of having the town pay off the mortgage. It was only a little over a thousand.
    And they figured it would cost them a whole lot more than that just in bookkeeping and whatnot to keep them on the dole for thirty, maybe forty, years than it would to pay off and let them keep the place.
     
    "But the upshot was that somebody got cheap about it, I guess, so the proposal was turned down. And it looked like Dead River was going into the social welfare business for a while. Very exciting. But then, of course, Ben and Mary disappeared and saved everybody the trouble."
     
    "Imbeciles,