Authors: William Lashner
46
I
HID MY CAR IN a grove of bushes outside the entrance of the great Reddman estate. I took my backpack out of the trunk and made my way across the low bridge that forded the stream and through the wide-open gates with their forged vines and cucumbers and their now sardonic wrought-iron legend: MAGNA EST VERITAS. Past the two great sycamores I turned left, away from the driveway, and skirted clockwise around the hill. What remained of the moon was rather dismally lit but the big house was full of light. I could hear the tinkle of glasses and the hum of voices. It seemed rather festive at Veritas that evening, considering the circumstances. But if Edward Shaw had been a blood relative of mine I might have been rather festive too.
It was too chilly a night for the black tee shirt and jeans I was sporting and I shivered as I picked my way through sparse trees, always keeping to my right the lights of the house and to my left the quiet sluicing of the stream that surrounded the property like a noose. It was taking longer than I had expected to make my way around the grounds and I started to rush until I found myself stepping into the margin of a dense wood. Only shards of the moon’s light survived the canopy above and I had a hard time seeing what was now in front of my face. I stepped away from a branch that slapped my outreached hand and walked straight into the trunk of a tree, smacking my forehead. I hadn’t intended to use a light so soon, not wanting anyone to spot me prowling about the grounds, trespassing like a common thief when what I really was was a lawyer on the make, but the scrape with that malicious tree was enough to convince me to pull a flashlight out of my pack and click it on.
An animate circle of tree trunks immediately sprang into existence, surrounding me. The white light of my lamp slipped past the trees closest to me before dying in the night. I had the sensation of being in the middle of something that went on forever, only able to discern the first ring around me. I took a moment to regain my bearings, the gurgle of the stream to the left, the hill and the house to the right, and then continued on my way, my path weaving here and there to avoid the black furrowed trunks blocking my way, until I entered the clearing, thick with tall grasses, that surrounded the gray and decrepit Poole house. I quickly turned off the light and was stunned by what I encountered.
Fireflies sparked around the old ruin of a house, hundreds and hundreds of them, little fingers of light that swept low in the grass or high about the porch roof and the first-floor windows of the house, flashing in a slow seductive dance. There hadn’t been any fireflies on the hill leading to Veritas, or in the woods, but here they were gathering as if for some incantatory purpose of their own.
I held my breath for a moment and listened.
Just the desperate call of crickets and the hoots of a few scattered birds.
I stepped back into the darkness of the wood, leaned against a tree trunk, and waited.
Caroline came about fifteen minutes later, scrambling around the pond through the woods and into the clearing, looking around, searching. She was chic in black — black dress, black pumps, black lipstick, black motorcycle jacket covering her shoulders like a cape. As I watched her walk up to the house I thought of all the things I hadn’t told her yet, how her great-grandfather was a crook, how her grandmother knew it, how her father wasn’t her father. I would tell her most of it eventually, I figured, but not all of it and not now. I pushed myself off the tree and stepped toward her. She started when she saw me emerging from the darkness of the woods.
“Oh, Victor, you scared me for a moment. What are we doing here again? God, I can’t believe there’s anything of interest in this old wreck. I explored it all when I was younger and it was pretty dilapidated then. It must be completely falling apart by now. What did my father say he saw here? He must have been imagining it, God knows he…”
I walked up to her as she spoke and put my finger to her moving lips, quieting her immediately. I leaned my mouth to her ear and whispered.
“I don’t know who was here when your father saw the light but I don’t think it wise we let them know we are taking a look. That’s why I wanted to do this at night. Did you tell anyone you were coming here?”
She shook her head.
“Did anyone see you leave? Did Nat?”
“Nat wasn’t there,” she whispered. And then I smelled it.
“You’ve been drinking.”
She leaned back and looked at me defiantly. “Family tradition at funerals.”
“Another of your situations?”
“Funny how having your brother incinerated can set you back.”
I looked her up and down and noticed something on the inside of her arm, a patch of white gauze. I turned the flashlight on and pointed the beam right at it. “What’s that?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“What the hell are you doing to yourself?” I said, certain that she had gone past alcohol into something more virulent.
She took a step back.
I followed her and reached for the gauze, ripping it off.
“Oh, Caroline,” I said with a sad sigh. “What are you doing to yourself?”
“It’s nothing,” she said, taking the gauze with its tape back from my hand and trying to reposition it on her arm. “Everyone’s doing it.”
“Oh, Caroline,” I said again and then I couldn’t say anything more. Her arm had been branded, a circular sun with regular curved rays pouring from it had been burned into her flesh and the skin around the sun was swollen red and proud. Tattoos were no longer permanent enough for her, I supposed.
“It’s my body,” she said with a practiced defiance that let me know she had said those very words many times before.
“Yes it is,” I said.
“Are we going in or are we just standing here all night?”
“Will you be able to handle this?”
She closed her eyes and swayed a bit before nodding.
“All right,” I said, “but keep it quiet.”
With the flashlight in one hand and her elbow in the other, I walked with her slowly, through the dips and turns of the fireflies, toward the house. A short flight of steps led to a sagging porch of gray timber, singed at the edges by fire, and on to the front door. These were the steps, I assumed, where Faith Reddman Shaw had first discovered the Poole daughter reading to Faith’s son, Kingsley. The wood creaked and bowed beneath our feet as we climbed. Caroline tripped slightly on the steps and fell into me. I pushed her straight again.
On the porch, I flashed the light briefly to the left and the right. The porch was empty of furniture, a few of the timbers had rotted completely through. One of the upright railings was charred black. Of the window on the left side of the door, two of the panes were smashed and the others were yellowed and brittle. The window on the right was boarded with plywood. A swift motion caught my attention and I aimed the beam of light at it. First one frog leaped from the porch, and then another. Cobwebs floated like ghost streamers from the railing and the roof, but the front entrance was free of them. I pointed that out to Caroline before we stepped to the door. There was an old rusted mortise lock and when I pressed down on the latch with my thumb it wouldn’t budge.
“Locked?” I said.
Caroline shrugged. I leaned my side into the door and gave a shove and quick as that it creaked open. We glanced at each other for a moment and then stepped inside.
We entered directly into a large parlor room, thick with swirls of dust, scattered dead leaves, cobwebs hanging like gauze in the corners. It was cold inside. I flashed the light on an old couch, the color of dirt, sitting across from a stone fireplace. Judging by its appearance the couch hadn’t been sat upon in a decade.
“I can’t believe this is still here,” said Caroline, softly, stepping toward it and rubbing her hand across a filthy arm. “Franklin and I cleaned up this room a bit and made fires here sometimes. We brought a rug in and sat by the hearth.”
I shined the light at the fireplace. There was a small pile of coals, gray with dust. A dead mouse nestled among the remains of a fire. There was nothing on the floor before the hearth but leaves.
“The rug’s gone,” I said.
She shrugged. “It was long ago.”
I cast the beam around the walls. A floral print wallpaper faded almost to brown, bare except for something over the mantelpiece. I stepped closer. It was a drawing of a man, a rather primitive drawing, faded and on yellow paper, tacked to the plaster above the fireplace like an ironic family portrait. The man in the picture was bald and the lines around his mouth were evident but it was done in a young person’s hand. The face of the man, I realized, was somehow familiar.
“Do you recognize him?” I asked.
She walked up to it and stared.
“I think,” she said, “he looks like the man in the photograph we found, with the tense-looking wife.”
“That must be Elisha Poole,” I said. “Probably drawn by his daughter.”
“This wasn’t here before,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“Hell, I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it was and I didn’t notice.”
Off the parlor was the kitchen, a large room with a few cabinets and a large wooden table. Two rickety chairs lay strewn upon the floor. There was an old wood-burning stove with disks of metal atop for burners, the stove where the Poole daughter stirred the broth for her mother while Faith Reddman Shaw watched, entranced, from outside. Pots and pans, blackened by fire, were scattered on the floor about the stove, covered with webs and leaves. A cement sink with one faucet stood by the wall, its weight resting on a rusted metal frame.
“Cold and cold running water,” I said. I stepped to it and turned the knob. Nothing.
“What exactly are we looking for, Victor?”
“I don’t know,” I said softly. “But I feel something here, don’t you? Something cramped and desolate.”
“It just feels old and cold.”
An archway from the kitchen led to another room, mostly empty, with a fireplace. It must have been the dining room but there were no tables or chairs, only a massive wooden breakfront. The upper doors of the breakfront were lined, where one would expect glass, with a pleated yellowed fabric. I tugged the doors open. The shelves, covered with a browned paper, were entirely empty. The lower part of the breakfront held three rows of drawers and the drawers I could pull open also contained nothing but the same browned paper. The top middle drawer, designed for the most valuable serving pieces, was locked, but that too was probably empty. It was doubtful the Poole daughter would have taken the china but left the silver.
“I suppose she took everything she wanted and could carry out,” I said, “and abandoned the rest.”
“I think she just wanted to get the hell out of here,” said Caroline Shaw too loudly. “Who wouldn’t?”
“Shhhhhhh,” I said.
At the far end of the dining room was an entranceway that led off to a narrow set of stairs. I followed the beam of light and started climbing. Slipping slightly, I grabbed hold of the banister and it tore off in my hand with a shriek. The banister slammed into the wood flooring and slid nosily down the stairs, plaster cascading behind it. I jumped as if I had been goosed. I turned around and Caroline was smirking at me.
At the top of the stairs was a hallway. In the beam of light I could see four doorways, three of them open. Across from us was a small room with a listing wooden bed frame. When we stepped in something scurried across the floor and disappeared. On the wall were tacks, spiking remnants of yellowed paper into the plaster. The floor was filled with tumors of dust and crumpled bits of white stuff and there was trash piled in one of the corners. The window was covered with plywood.
The next room was a bathroom with a wooden floor and an old toilet. The sink was ceramic and cracked and there was one faucet. Beyond the bathroom was another room completely bare of any useful furniture, in its center a heap of broken chairs and shattered china. A doll without its head rested atop a rocking chair with only one rocker. Across the hall was the door that was closed.
Without waiting for me, Caroline went to that door and shoved it open. I followed her inside. This room too had a fireplace and there was a mattress on the floor and an old transistor radio, circa not 1923 but 1979. On the wall to the right, its sole window covered with plywood, hung a poster with a grinning, multicolored skull above the legend “
STEAL YOUR FACE!
” and another showing a leather-jacketed greaser with a pair of sneakers hanging from the neck of his guitar. Bruce Springsteen? The Grateful Dead?
“I guess old Mrs. Poole was ahead of her time,” I said.
“This was our room,” said Caroline softly. She picked up the small black-and-gray radio and turned it on, but nothing happened. “It’s still tuned to WMMR, I’d bet. Oh God.”
“What was this room before you and Harrington took it over?”
“I think it was Mrs. Poole’s bedroom,” she said without turning to me. “I seem to remember there was stuff in the closet.”
I looked at her for a moment, standing still, with the dead radio cradled in her arms like a baby, and then I stepped quickly to the closet door and pulled at it. It was stuck at first, swollen shut, but I gave it a good yank and it opened up for me with a shriek from the hinges.
Inside, moth-eaten, shabby with age, like skeletons of their former selves, were dresses, some still hanging, some slumped to the floor, their frills darkened, their colors washed out by the white light of the flashlight and their age. Which of these dresses, I wondered, had she worn on the night of the ball when she so publicly refused Claudius Reddman’s offer to dance? Well, he sure as hell deserved the rebuke.
With two fingers I lifted up the dresses from the floor, finding nothing but old shoes underneath. There was a shelf above the bar and I stood up on my tiptoes to look at it. Hats and shoes, the leather cracked, and a pile of rags in the corner. I jumped up and grabbed at the rag pile and pulled them down. Dust flew and I sneezed loudly. When I stopped sneezing I noticed now, in the corner, a little wooden box. I jumped up again and snatched it. With a little work I was able to lift off the lid.