The Good House

by Tananarive Due

  “I dunno, it’s just weird. Like déjà vu or something.”

  “Well, what are you waiting for? Dreams are messages, dude. Maybe there’s a stash of money in there and you’re supposed to find it. Or, wait—maybe there’s a safe.”

  With those words, Corey felt his foreboding vanish. Theremight be something valuable hidden in there, and it was finder’s keepers, as far as he was concerned. An afternoon of drudgery had just turned into an adventure. He felt his shoulder pop when he tugged hard on the doorknob. The door was locked. “Shit,” he said.

  “Second curse in twenty minutes. Did we make a rule for that? I forget.”

  “Fuck you. Hand me that little knife you carry.”

  “You better hope there’s some money in here,hombre , because you’re deep in debt.”

  While Sean stood behind him, watching, Corey manipulated the keyhole with the slender nail file in Sean’s Swiss army knife, trying to trigger the release. His hands were slightly unsteady, residue from his shock at seeing the door and the memory of his recurring dream, but he kept at it, searching for the right pin. He just had to find the sweet spot.

  “You’re doing it wrong,” Sean said.

  “Like you know any better.”

  “Seriously, it’s the other side—”

  In mid-argument, Corey heard a click, and the door flew open.

  Corey’s feet flew backward, so he bumped into Sean, who took a step back too. The door opened so quickly, it was almost as if there had been a weight behind it, a spring. But nothing emerged from behind the door, which was open hardly more than a crack. Corey smelled stale air floating out; old clothes, mothballs, cedar. The smells were strong, triggering a sneezing fit. The air felt thick. His eyes watered as he sneezed.

  “Bless you,” Sean said.

  “Thanks.”

  The closet was narrow and small, but the space was crammed. Clothes on hangers were packed against each other, dense and tight, and the closet overflowed with shoes, ribbons, papers, a walking cane, a dull steel shotgun with a narrow barrel, and too much else to see. In a room full of junk, Corey thought, here was the junk Mecca.

  “I don’t see a safe,” Sean said, disappointed.

  But Corey didn’t want to give up that fast. Why would he have been dreaming about this door unless there was something to find here? “I’m gonna dig around a little. But first, we’ve got to move these clothes.”

  Corey carried out armfuls of wooden hangers weighted with heavy coats and suits, and Sean took each load from him, finding a place in the room to pile them. The itchy woolen fabrics felt rough against Corey’s forearms, scratching him. He was sneezing so much that he would need to grab some tissue soon, or else he’d have snot all over his face.

  “Hey, Corey, you know what? Check out theseclothes,” Sean said. “This suit looks like it’s a hundred years old. There’s places we could sell stuff like this.”

  Sean held up a suit on a hanger for Corey to see. The dark gray suit had a long coat that didn’t look like any fashion Corey recognized, unless it was a tuxedo coat, but it didn’t look quite like a tuxedo because the buttons and collar went up too high. It was just different. Old, like Sean said. He sniffed the fabric, but his nose tickled from the sharp scent of old mothballs. These clothes had belonged to someone who was dead now, Corey thought.

  “Hey, man, you’re right. We could sell stuff like that to antique stores, costume shops…”

  “And places that sell props for movies and plays,” Sean said.

  “Hell, yeah. My mom could hook us up.”

  Corey’s excitement flickered when he thought of his mother. She wouldn’t let them sell things from the closet for themselves. She’d sayno for no good reason, her favorite word.

  The shotgun leaning inside the closet caught Corey’s eye suddenly, and he ran his fingers along the cold barrel, which was longer than newer shotguns he’d seen. He lifted the gun up; it wasn’t as heavy as it looked, only about ten pounds. Corey examined the gun, trying to recognize the age of the wooden stock, but he didn’t know enough about guns. This one was definitely real, though. He’d had a real gun in his hands only once, the time Dad let him touch his black handgun when he was nine, a gun with tape wrapped around the butt. Mom said no when Dad asked to take him to a shooting range like he begged him, so he hadn’t seen it since. Dad always offered to take him shooting now, but Corey didn’t want it now the way he had then, when it would have mattered.

  “This gun’s been around awhile, too,” Corey said.

  “My dad would know better than me, but that looks like a breechloader, maybe,” Sean said. “It could be eighty or a hundred years old. A collector might want it.”

  Corey lifted the gun, resting the solid stock against his chest, stretching his arms out to balance the barrel. He felt a swell of power, mimicking a sniper’s stance. The gun had a tiny goalpost-shaped sight, and Corey closed one eye, squinting, lining up his targets as his finger massaged the steel trigger. He aimed toward a corner of the wall above the door frame. Then at a lightbulb sitting atop a lamp stripped of its shade. Then at Sean’s ducking head.

  “Fuck. Hey, don’t play around. You don’t point a gun at people,” Sean said. All playfulness had leapt from his eyes. Corey almost didn’t recognize him as the laid-back guy he’d been hanging with for the past week, the guy who hardly cursed and always had something funny to say.

  “Sorry,” Corey said, lowering the gun. Suddenly, he felt a snake of ice down his spine. He’d had his finger on the trigger of a gun that might be loaded, and he’d pointed it at Sean’s head without thinking twice about it. He might as well be nine again, he thought. “I’m really sorry, man. That was me being a dumb-ass.”

  Sean didn’t look reassured. “We don’t know if that’s loaded or what, right?”

  “You’re right. I messed up. I guess I thought the gun was so old, it probably wouldn’t work.” Sean was right to be pissed, but at the same time Corey wished he could let it go. He didn’t have patience for people who made a big deal out of things. He hoped a joke would snap Sean out of his funk. “This gun looks so old, I thought some cowboys might have been using it to slaughter the local Indians way back when.”

  Sean’s lip curled slightly. “Whatever, no big deal. But even if it was that old, that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work.”

  “True.”

  “And anyway, just so you know how it really happened, cowboys didn’t slaughter Indians in this area. Most of the tribes died off from disease back in the 1800s, like the Wahkiakum and Cathlamet tribes, and a lot of the Chinook tribe. It was more like a medical slaughter, because they didn’t have immunity. I read that at the historical society,” Sean said, and Corey knew things were cool between them again. Sean the know-it-all was back, leaning on his knowledge like a one-legged man leans on crutches, Corey thought. Still, he was glad Sean wasn’t too pissed.

  “You must have been bored if you were hanging out at the historical society,” Corey said.

  “Bored? When we first moved here, I wanted to kill myself.”

  “Glad it’s not just me.” Corey put the gun aside, embarrassed at how careless he’d been. Life in Sacajawea had been ten times better with Sean around, so he needed to be more appreciative of the guy. “Sorry again about that. Let’s get some music going in here.”

  Corey turned on the boom box he’d set up on the floor, and the Cuban percussion and vocals of the Orishas filled the room. Cowbells, shakers, trumpets, acoustic guitars. The music made Corey think of palm trees and the beach, and suddenly he didn’t feel so far from California. The more he heard the CD, the better it got. It blew him away. The song playing now, “Madre,” was a tribute to a mother who sacrificed for her children, Corey’s favorite. Singing in Spanish, Corey forgot about horseback riding. He and Sean worked in the sweltering room, sifting through the closet.

  Corey got excited when he saw a large, rusting strongbox on the floor beneath a shoe rack. There was no lock, and when he pull
ed it out to open it, he found receipts and ledgers for an E. J. Goode Pharmacy on 150 Main Street in Sacajawea, dated from 1922.

  “We should take that to the historical society,” Sean said.

  “Yeah, I guess,” Corey said, emptying it out. He hoped he’d find money inside, but no luck. The papers were just the financial records of the same dead man whose clothes they had found. This had been their biggest thrill so far, and it was nothing. Maybe he’d never really dreamed about this door, Corey thought. Or, if he had, maybe it didn’t mean anything. He wasn’t sure anymore.

  “I’ve got to go,” Sean said when the CD had repeated three times and they were both covered in dust. “I need a smoke, like,now . And Dad’s expecting me back by five.”

  “Yeah, man, all right,” Corey said.

  At the door downstairs, Corey gave Sean the quick, one-armed embrace he gave his friends in Oakland when they had to take off. Sean was cool, he thought. They would have been friends anywhere, probably, not just in Sacajawea. Standing in the foyer, Corey smelled spicy food cooking. Dinner would be the high point of his day, as usual. Mealtime was the only thing he and his mother could agree on.

  Corey popped his head into the kitchen from the butler’s pantry. His mother was standing over a pot while she held a recipe card up to her face, stirring a wooden spoon as she read.

  “Can I have a Coke?”

  She didn’t look away from her card. “How many have you had today?”

  Damn. She was really something else, managing every detail of his life. “Just one.”

  “Okay, but two’s enough. Too much sugar. Your father’s family is full of diabetes.”

  Anything that had to do with his father had something wrong with it. No surprise there. Sighing, Corey opened the refrigerator, and the blast of cool air felt good. He stood there fantasizing about what this house would feel like if it had air-conditioning. Mom kept saying it didn’t need it, but she was tripping. This house might stay cool in the fall, but it was hot as hell in summer.

  Corey grabbed his soda can, flicking open the tab. “What’s cooking?” he said, peeking into the orange pot she was stirring. He saw chicken chunks, fat sausage pieces, tiny shrimp, and okra in a golden red sauce. Whatever it was, it was bound to be good.

  His mother smiled at him, and he was amazed again at what a smile did to her face. “Gumbo,” she said. “One of Gramma Marie’s recipes.”

  “Well, that sh—” Corey stopped short. He’d been about to say,That shit smells great, like he would have said to his father. If Sean had been here, he would have busted a gut laughing. “That sure smells great, Mom. I can’t wait for dinner.”

  “Really?”

  Corey turned to look at her because of something in her voice, and her face made him fidget. His mother’s eyes had gone gentle, an expression that reminded him of the way the fat girls at school stared at the quarterback, Rodrick Lovell, in the hallway. Wanting something they know they can’t have. He felt bad for those girls when he saw them, and he almost felt bad for his mother now. “You’ve always been a great cook, “he said, looking away from her eyes and how they made him feel. “Anyway, I’m still working upstairs. Call me when it’s ready, a’ight?”

  “Sweetheart, you don’t have to keep working. Just do a little at a time.”

  “No, it’s cool. There’s some good stuff up there.” He didn’t tell her about his dreams and the blue door. He would feel like an idiot, and she would look at him like hewas one. But even after he’d decided not to say anything, Corey wished he could tell. Not telling left a hole in the air.

  “What did you find?” Mom said. She always seemed to know his mind.

  “Old clothes, papers, you know. Just stuff.” He was already on his way back out to the foyer. Maybe he’d talk about it later. For now, he had to find what he was looking for. He was glad she didn’t call after him.

  When he went back upstairs to the junk room, Corey realized that except for the path that led from the door to the window, and another path from the window to the closet, the room looked worse than before. The closet had seemed small at first, but the crush of things had spilled into the rest of the room. Piles of clothes. Stacks of papers. Just looking at all of it gave him a headache, and for a moment, he was mad again. What did this have to do with him?

  But when he got back to the closet, his eagerness returned.

  The clothes were gone, leaving the core of the space empty. The warped, peeling white paint on the back wall was visible for the first time in decades, Corey figured. He noticed a few more strongboxes up on the top shelf, but they had lost their intrigue after the disappointment of the last one. He’d save those for last, his final shot for cash, gold, or stock certificates. For now, the floor was still densely packed with shoes, unrecognizable gadgets, and fallen clothing. What if there was a hidden floorboard?

  Corey was ready to find something to change everything. Something that would matter.

  As it turned out, Corey’s search didn’t take more than another ten minutes.

  Nothing else caught his interest as he waded through the mess on the closet floor, and he couldn’t find any loose wooden floorboards, so his eyes wandered back to the top shelf, to the strongboxes. He grabbed a chair and balanced himself, pulling them down one by one. Of the four strongboxes he found, two were locked, one was filled with unmarked prescription bottles and empty vials, and the last one had another pile of receipts, these from 1925. Corey laughed when he saw the product names listed in sales columns: Age Reversal Pills. Vision Restorer. Manhood Cure.

  What a load of crap, he thought.

  E. J. Goode had a great year in 1925, Corey noticed as he glanced through the paperwork. That year’s income was $100,000, about five times what he had made in 1922. The mail-order business brought in most of the money, not the pharmacy at 150 Main Street, so Corey decided the pharmacy had been mostly a front. E. J. Goode might have been the friendly neighborhood pharmacist, but through the mail he’d been selling products he knew good and damn well were quack bullshit. There hadn’t been penicillin in those days, much less Viagra. Age Reversal Pills? How did Goode get away with selling that junk? Didn’t people know it was bullshit?

  Unless itwasn’t bullshit, Corey thought, and his imagination stirred.

  Corey went back to the strongbox full of empty bottles and opened it, shaking the bottles and vials, holding them up to the light. A few had powdery residue stuck solid to the glass, but most were empty. E. J. Goode could have been putting anything in these bottles, Corey thought. But, then again, hadn’t Mom told him Gramma Marie had taken up with Goode for a while before he died? What if she’d helped his business along with a little magic? A little conversation with theorishas?

  Corey’s ears seemed to ring, and he felt dizzy. He stood up to regain his balance, and when he did, he realized that he hadn’t checked to see if there was anything else on the top shelf, behind the space where the strongboxes had been. Corey found yellow, crumbling newspaper pages, and he swept them aside to make sure nothing else was hidden beneath them.

  Something was. Corey grabbed it, pulling it out.

  It was a large black satchel, so dusty it was coated gray. But everything about it feltright: the weight, the size, the appearance. Instead of déjà vu, this time Corey felt as if he were walking through his future. He held the satchel, his heart thudding.

  Corey couldn’t make himself open it, and he couldn’t put it aside. He was glad Sean was gone, because Sean wouldn’t have understood what it was like to discover something he knew he was supposed to have, but at the same time he knew hewasn’t supposed to have it. It was his, and it wasn’t. Corey’s thoughts swam, confused. If he didn’t know better, he’d think he was scared of it.

  “I’m losing my damn mind,” he said, and there was no one in the room to argue.

  He had turned off the boom box long ago, so the room was silent. Corey took a deep breath before he turned the satchel’s tiny metal pin. Carefully, as if it migh
t break, he pulled the leather tongue free and opened the mouth wide. It was filled with papers, not money.Damn .

  Corey pulled out the thick stack, about a hundred pages. He only realized he was holding a manuscript when he saw the title page:Le Livre des Mystères, it said in the dead center, typed with typewriter keys that smudged the ink on thee ’s.

  It was French, so Corey wasn’t sure of the words. He’d been taking Spanish, not French. Still, the language seemed similar enough that he could figure out every word except one. Thesomething of the Mysteries, it said.Livre. Libre. Freedom? No, that didn’t make sense.

  Livre, livre…?

  The answer came to him in a flood of adrenaline:Livre meantbook, of course, likelibro in Spanish. This was calledThe Book of the Mysteries . Corey grinned, feeling triumphant. There was no author’s name typed beneath the title, but Corey saw a signature scrawled on the bottom right side, dated by the year, 1929.Marie F. Toussaint was spelled in a stylish, womanly signature, so pretty it was almost calligraphy.