Lineage (36 page)

John wiped his brow with the back of his hand, the skin there slick with sweat. He glanced out of the pickup’s window at the darkening sky. He couldn’t remember the last time it had been this hot and rainy in September.
The world’s gone a little haywire,
he thought, as he rounded the last bend and Lance’s house came into view. He felt a little disappointment when he saw that the younger man’s SUV wasn’t parked in its usual spot.

John pulled the truck around the short loop and stopped in line with the front door. He breathed in and let out a shuddering breath. The nausea he had pushed away the night before crept back in. He hadn’t had a drink since the night he told Lance everything he knew about the young man’s origins, and it was beginning to catch up with him. He hadn’t gone this long without alcohol in well over fifteen years. The shaking in his hands and the unsteadiness in his legs he could handle, but the roiling sickness of his stomach was almost unbearable.

He breathed in a few more times, rubbing the webbing between his thumb and forefinger with his opposite hand. May had done this to Henry when he came down with the stomach flu. She’d said it was an Old-World cure, that she’d read it in a natural medicine book somewhere. John hadn’t put much faith in it then, but it had calmed his son, and it seemed to be doing the trick now. The nausea eased enough for him to open his door and get onto his feet beside the truck.

The air felt like a wet blanket over his shoulders as he shuffled around to the bed of the pickup. His shirt dampened further, and he felt a bead of sweat drizzle down the middle of his chest. He reached over the side of the truck and grasped the handle of the gas can and slid it to the rear of the bed. The can in the shed was beginning to get a little light, and he hated running out when there was work to be done.

The tailgate stuck when he tried to open it and he cussed out loud at it, willing it to release. After another tug, it did. He slid the can out and set it beside him on the ground, then slammed the gate shut. He would have to start thinking about a different vehicle soon; the old Ranger was beginning to fall apart.

“You and me both,” John muttered as he bent and picked up the can from the gravel.

The sky looked lower, and waves had started to beat a steady rhythm on the rocks below. He decided that he’d better hurry if he was going to get any work done before the rain decided the day.

“John.”

He heard the whisper just as he took a step toward the shed. The door to the house had swung open. John watched the entry for movement, but when no one emerged, he moved closer, peering into the dim interior.

“Lance?
You here?”
John took another step before the voice from within the house stopped him dead in his tracks.

“John. Your lies have finally caught up with you. May and your son are here with us.”

The low, guttural speech pattern couldn’t be mistaken. He had heard it too many times over the years when collecting his check, the German accent hiding beneath layers of years speaking English, but still there.

“Erwin?”
John croaked, his throat cinching shut. The air in his lungs was too warm, as if he’d breathed dishwater instead of oxygen. He couldn’t have heard the
voice,
it must’ve been the heat finally getting to him. He squinted at the door. Something moved deep within the house.
A fluttering of whiteness, like someone lunging between the rooms, trying to be seen and not seen at the same time.
John turned and started walking toward the
truck,
certain he had the beginnings of a heat stroke.

“John.”

The voice froze his guts solid, and for the second time he stopped, his muscles rigid while his heart punched at his ribs. The gas can
dropped
from his hand. He turned. The doorway still stood empty.

“May?”

“You killed me, John.
Killed us both.
You left those pills out on
purpose,
I always knew you thought Henry was a burden.”

John’s mouth had turned into a cottony desert without words. His mind reeled. “No, May, I loved Henry, both of you. I
woulda
never hurt him, you know that.”

“Liar.”
May’s voice sounded cold and distant but still full of malice. “You killed us both—Henry with the pills, me with the cancer. You helped it grow, like your precious bushes and shrubs, and nurtured it along with your emotionless soul.”

John took a shaking step toward the house and saw another flit of white near the living room.
I’m speaking with my dead wife.
The thought sped through his mind, but he answered anyway. “May, you know I loved you, still love you. I—”

“
Da
.”

John stopped again. “Henry?” His voice crumbled as tears ran with the sweat down the sides of his face. His heart ached, and he had to restrain himself from bolting toward the house. He could almost feel Henry in his arms, the smell of his hair after a bath, his smiling face mirroring his own. The forty-five years since he had last seen his son melted away.

“Henry?” John pleaded again.

“They’re here with us, John,” Erwin’s voice answered. “They’re waiting for you. Come inside.”

John felt himself moving, the heat pressing on him from all directions. His vision narrowed to the outline of the door like a hazy tunnel pulling him inexorably forward.

“You come in here and make this better, John
Hanrahan
. You atone for what you’ve done.”

John halted. Something in May’s voice made him pause. It had sounded like there was liquid in her throat, her voice thickening. John blinked and his vision expanded, and he looked past the doorway.

The
rictus
of Erwin’s ruined face hung in the shadows, suspended there without bodily form supporting it. John watched as the teeth parted and a wet chuckle escaped from the thing’s disembodied mouth. The face dissolved into nothing and everything became still again.

John backed away, his breath hitching beneath his soaked shirt and his white hair hanging across his forehead. His mouth opened and closed like a fish asking for air.
His hands clenching painfully, disturbing the arthritis within.
The gas can bumped against the side of his foot and he stopped. John looked down at it, as if he had never seen it before, and reached to pick it up. It felt heavy in his hand, a good feeling. There was plenty of gas within the red plastic.

John walked toward the house and up the few stairs, unscrewing the cap as he disappeared inside.

The nurse’s key spun within the lock and Lance heard the tumblers falling away.

“Go right in, sir. Take as much time as you need,” the nurse said with a smile. She looked twenty years younger than any other worker in the nursing home, her blond hair curled and her uniform pressed in an almost obsessive way.

“I know you’re supposed to stand right outside the door, but could you give us a little privacy?” Lance asked as he motioned to the bench that sat a few feet from the elevator doors.

She smiled again and nodded in an obliging way. “She always seems so peaceful. I’ll be right over here if you need me.”

Lance thanked her and watched as she walked down the hall toward the bench. When he turned, he felt a flooding sense of déjà vu. The room looked exactly as it had during his last visit. The bed still made in the corner.
The desk just below the high window.
And the woman, who, for all he knew, hadn’t moved since he’d left. He stepped into the room and felt something change at once. It was like he had dropped several hundred feet toward sea level, the pressure of the air nudging against his eardrums. There seemed to be less air in the room as he crossed the space between the door and the desk, and he moved with effort through it.

Annette stared at the wall, her hair uncombed and her hands bundled beneath a light blanket resting over her lap. A new crossword along with a fresh pencil sat before her. The sharpened tip of the pencil pointed directly at Lance as he sat in the extra chair. The old woman remained statuesque, and for a moment Lance wondered if she’d died in the chair. He imagined her soul escaping without bothering to shut her eyes as it left, leaving her like an abandoned house with the windows open. He leaned closer and listened in the stillness of the pressurized room. Her breath whispered between her parted lips, and he sat back.

“Annette, I know you can hear me.” Lance watched for any reaction. Not a tremor broke the semblance of a painted picture. “Erwin killed Gerald Rhinelander, didn’t he? Along with all the other men who used to work for him. He killed them and dumped their cars in the lake, didn’t he?” Lance kept his voice low but increased its intensity. His eyes bored holes in the old woman’s face. He searched for an answer, some sign that she had heard him wherever she hid within herself. Even the blink of a wrinkled eyelid would have given him encouragement, but she did nothing. Her eyes never left the blank wall before her.

Lance reached into his back pocket and found the edges of the envelope there. He yanked it free and pulled the contents out into the dim light of the room. With a flip of his fingers, he turned the photo around and held it up several inches in front of Annette’s staring eyes.

“This man, Gerald Rhinelander.
You’ve seen him before. He came to your house and Erwin killed him.” Lance’s voice began to shake. The emotional weight of the past few days, compounded by the squeezing air of the room, began to bleed through. His hand trembled, causing the picture of Gerald by his car in the sunlight to vibrate. Lance shook his head and dropped the photo onto the desk, covering the bulk of the crossword. He could see half of Gerald’s last name and the
W
in
Wulf
, and he marveled at the thought of this picture ending up here in this place of forgotten words and life, covering the name of the murdered man that graced its surface.

Lance looked at Annette again. Nothing could bring her back. It was clear now. The path she had taken had been too narrow to turn around and she was stuck somewhere in the inner sanctum of her psyche, unable to move one way or another.

All at once he felt defeat overcome him like a black shade being drawn. There would be no answers for him here; it was just another blocked alley in his life. So many times he had begun to hope that he would shed the skin of his past, that he would be reborn to pursue an existence without fear and suffering at every turn. He supposed it was too much to hope for. For some there could be no solace, only a constant weariness of what would come next. 

He stood and swore quietly in his frustration and began to walk toward the door. He had to get out of this room. He needed to feel the sky above him, even if all it held for him now were thunder and the gray of forgetting. There was only one thing he could do now: run. Run away from it all, far enough to leave the souls of his father and grandfather behind to whatever malevolence they had planned. He had to leave this town, the house, his story, and Mary.

Mary.

A sound stopped him at the doorway. He turned toward an overhead vent, thinking the cooling system had unsuccessfully tried to start. It had been a keening sound, like air rushing over metal. It came again and his scalp shrunk tight to his skull. He turned and looked at the old woman, who still sat facing the wall.

“
Heeeee
.”
Her voice was a breeze blowing through a rusty pipe.

Lance felt himself moving, and then the chair was beneath him again. A hand, skeletal with fingernails as black as sunflower seeds, had crept from beneath the blanket and now rested on the picture. Her eyes had shifted from the wall, and were examining the photo just as intently.

“
Heee
.”
Annette made an attempt to swallow, and a tongue so dry Lance could hear it rasp against her lips came into view.

“He,” Lance said, willing the words forth from the withered form beside him.

“
Heee
didn’t.” Annette’s brow creased and she swallowed again. “He didn’t kill him.”

Lance blinked at the old woman, whose eyes ran back and forth across the picture like it was about to disappear and she was committing it to memory.

“Erwin didn’t kill him?” Lance asked, bafflement the sort he had never encountered before saturating his thoughts. Annette’s head shook from side to side in slow denial. Her head turned, and for the first time her eyes looked into his.

“I did.”

Lance sat back in the chair as Annette’s attention floated back to the picture.

“You did?” he asked, the disbelief so acute within his voice that he felt sure she would deny the statement. Instead, he watched her eyes begin to glaze over, and within seconds, the wall had become her focal point once again. Lance realized what was happening and sat forward.

“Why? Why did you kill Gerald? Did he do something to you? Were you seeing each other? What? What happened?” Lance’s eyes roamed over the old woman’s face, watching for a sign that she was formulating an answer. When her stare deepened, he began to panic. He reached out and snapped his fingers before her face, over and over.

“Stay with me, Annette. I need you to stay with me.” Frantically, Lance looked around for something that would help him keep her from falling back into the abyss from which she had emerged. The crossword was the only thing that stood out to him. He held it up in front of her face, along with the picture of Gerald.