The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries

I was putting up the traverse rods for the living room draperies when Judy let out a screech. She sounded like a woman who’d had the world’s biggest mouse scurry between her feet.

The sound lifted me off the hassock where I’d been standing to add height to my somewhat bony six-one. I jetted toward the source of the sound, skidding off the hallway into the empty bedroom.

Judy, the delectable, hadn’t been frightened by a mouse. Instead, the culprit was a sweatsock. That’s right, an ordinary white woolen sweatsock, misshapen and slightly bedraggled from having been laundered many times. It lay in the middle of the bare floor, and it had to be the source of her trouble. Besides Judy there was nothing else in the room. She stood pressed against the wall, elfin face pale, blue eyes round. Pointing at the sock, she tried to talk, getting hung up on the “J” in my name.

“J-J-J-Jim, that darn thing floated out of the closet and g-g-g-gave me a hug across the face!”

She was making no sense whatever to me. I gawked at her, and the expression on my face bugged some of the fright out of her. Her eyes began to flash.

“Don’t you care that an old sweatsock floats out of a closet, halfway across an empty room, and nuzzles up to your bride, Jim Thornton?”

“Well, I... uh... Sure I care! But how could it have happened?”

“You tell me. You’re the brain. All I know is what happened. When I’d finished putting things away in the bedroom, I came in here. I was thinking how we’d fix this room for a nursery some day. Then that sock...” She shuddered. “I wouldn’t let my baby take a twenty minute nap in this room.”

I detoured the sock, grinning at her. “Baby? Judy, you’re pregnant already!”

She shook off my clutching hands. “Don’t be silly! We’ve been married less than a month. I haven’t had time to know if I’m pregnant or not. But when we do have a baby, James Arnold Thornton, you’d better have an explanation for anti-gravity sweat socks, if we stay in this house.”

I turned and sank to one knee beside the sock. I poked it with a finger. Nothing supernatural occurred. The sock was as commonplace and ordinary as... well, as old sweat socks.

“When the Bicklefords moved out,” I pronounced, “the sock was overlooked. It was probably in a dark corner of the closet shelf.”

“Brilliant,” said Judy, putting her sunny blonde head next to my drab brown thatch. “Of course it was overlooked by their movers.”

“And a breeze happened to blow it across your face.”

“Breeze?”

“Capricious breeze.”

She tilted her head and gave me a look. “Capricious breeze in an empty room with the windows closed.”

Her matter of fact tone was worse than sarcasm. My male ego recoiled. “Naturally,” I said with a certain hauteur, “the first home I finagle with a mortgage company for my wife has to be fouled up with a poltergeist!”

She gingerly picked up the sock, stood, held the sock dangling at arm’s length. “Now you’re a little closer to the beam.”

I stood up beside her, dusting my hands. “Come on, you can’t be serious. You don’t believe in zombies or voices from beyond the grave.”

“Nope,” she said, “but this sock is real as life. And poltergeists are too well authenticated to deny that something every now and then acts up in somebody’s house. There have been any number of cases in England. And how about those people in Massachusetts whose house made the newspapers? And the house on Long Island — or was it in the Bronx — that was shown on the television newscast? Crockery flying all over the place in that one — and a team of tough New York cops staked out the joint and saw some of it happen! You going to fly in the face of hard-bitten, super-realistic New York cops?”

“Not me,” I said helplessly.

“So there,” Judy said. She had riveted her gaze on the sock all this while. Now a strange mood seemed to have overtaken all of her initial fright. “You know, I really don’t think he was trying to frighten me. The touch of the sock was ever so gentle, a caress. I think he was trying to say hello and make friends. Still,” she glanced about, “I’m not sure we should plan a nursery in here.”

That’s where the subject rested for the moment. I wandered back to work, more concerned than I cared to show. In our recent college days, Judy and I had both been as far from the LSD crowd as you could polarize. Just a couple of the hard-studying non-jets that made up ninety-five percent of the student body, sans publicity, and floating sweat socks didn’t fit into our pattern of living at all.