by Lee Mandelo
Rain-thick night welcomed him, condensation clinging to his skin. Riley hopped into his Mazda, giving him puppy-dog sympathy eyes. Andrew stood at the open door of the Supra, not ready to leave. He tilted his chin and let drizzle soak his hair, his shirt. Warm lights glowed inside the homestead. Sam’s silhouette passed across the living room windows. Andrew collapsed into the driver’s seat and focused all his scattered thoughts on the drive to Capitol.
When he came in through the kitchen door, his roommate was drinking a beer at the open fridge. He elbowed him aside to grab one for himself. In companionable silence, the pair stood drinking, glances half-catching. Riley crushed his can with a refreshed sigh and tossed it in the garbage. Andrew leaned against the table, his free hand braced on the dirty glass top.
“Sam hasn’t been, like, serious with anyone before. Just so you’re aware. I’m not labeling the thing you’re doing with him, but he spends more time with you than he does with me and it doesn’t feel casual to, I assume, let him give you your first dick,” Riley said. He ran a nervous hand through his fringe, rain-frizzed hair sticking up in all directions. Andrew felt his face go red as fire, mouth open but no words coming out. Riley continued, “He’s spent so much time on me he didn’t bother with his own shit, until now. He deserves a good thing to happen to him, Andrew. I do like you, but I don’t know if you’re a good thing.”
“I don’t either,” he said finally.
Riley nodded twice, punched his shoulder with a loose fist, and mounted the stairs to his room. Andrew watched him go. As he lay on the couch with a pillow and his comforter, his phone buzzed with a single message.
I don’t want to share not even with a dead man
* * *
At a quarter to eleven the following morning, Sam texted Called in to the garage, omw.
Andrew tapped a quick okay and ate another bite of cereal, seated at the kitchen table with Riley like siblings. He’d expected to wake to an email or five from Troth, but his inbox disappointed him: nothing so far. Of unspoken accord, the cousins were keeping him company instead of going to their respective jobs for the afternoon—just in case she reached out, or to help him figure a follow-up if she didn’t.
“I read the chapter on her creepy ancestors,” Riley said through a soggy mouthful.
“Yeah?”
“No more fucked up than yours, but that’s not saying much,” he replied.
“Eddie’s, not mine,” Andrew said out of habit.
Riley cocked one brow. Andrew crammed another bite of cereal in his mouth for cover, because he knew better—whether he accepted it or not, Eddie had left him all the Fulton wealth and a Fulton curse to boot. On the tabletop his phone began to buzz, rattling the glass raucously. He fumbled for it, not recognizing the number, then answered with a blank “Hello?”
“Mr. Blur,” Jane Troth said on the other end of the line.
The paste of cereal and milk almost lodged in his throat as he swallowed too soon, saying, “Hey, hello.”
“I apologize for calling uninvited, but there’s something I need to share with you and it was not appropriate for our university email server.” Strain pulled her voice thin around the edges. “It appears Mark has a copy of the text you were looking for, and more besides, that I wasn’t aware he’d collected. I have concerns to discuss.”
“What concerns?”
Riley watched him with a hawk’s focus, gripping the rim of the table.
Troth hesitated for so long that, without the sound of her breathing, he’d have thought the call had dropped. “I’m worried that my husband might have interfered with Edward, to a degree. Would you be willing to come to the house to speak with me, as soon as possible?”
Interfered was a polite, euphemistic turn of phrase.
Andrew’s skin shivered with suspicion. “I could be there in an hour or two.”
“Thank you, I’ll be waiting,” she said and hung up.
Andrew laid his phone flat on the glass, goose bumps prickling along his arms.
Riley asked succinctly, “What the hell?”
“Troth thinks her husband did something to Eddie,” Andrew said, slow and testing. “She wants me to come out to her place, said she found the monograph.”
“That’s too fucking perfect,” Riley said.
“The timing is a little much, ain’t it?” he said.
“You’re not going alone,” Riley said.
“No, Sam’s on his way.”
To warn him ahead of time, Andrew texted:
she took the bait, said she found the book in her house
thinks her husband might have done it
will you come with me to her place this afternoon for a chat?
Sure
What a coincidence, her figuring that out all the sudden
But probably not huh
The instant Sam opened the porch door twenty minutes later, Riley pre-empted his hello: “Let me go with you.”
“Dude,” Andrew said, clinking his spoon on the rim of his long-finished bowl.
Sam had a cardboard carrier of iced coffees for the three of them balanced on his left hand. The door swung wide, letting the air-conditioning out, while he sat the drinks on the table and clapped a hand on his cousin’s shoulder.
“Upstairs,” he said, hauling Riley to his feet. “Let’s have a chat just the two of us.”
While the pair of them tromped up the steps, Andrew paced the ground floor, straightening objects and generally fidgeting with the detritus of daily life that unfolded over their tables, couches, front room floor. From the end table he snagged Eddie’s double black-and-red key fob. Two of the keys on the ring didn’t fit the doors at Capitol, both cold iron, battered and tarnished. Andrew flicked them to and fro with his thumb, waiting while the murmur of Sam and Riley’s low-grade argument filtered through the vents. Keys to the old home he assumed, his full inheritance lurking out in the overgrown countryside, just like the Troth estate he was about to head for.
The coffees sat sweating on the table when he returned to the kitchen, a welcome courtesy from his—courtesy of Sam. Footsteps thumped in the hall above him. Riley said down the stairwell, “You’re going to need help once you’re there, if she’s the one that fucked with that ring. Neither of you is a sensitive or whatever like me.”
“Then what am I?” Andrew hollered to them.
Sam jogged down the steps in shorts and desert boots, caught Andrew’s waist in one big hand and snagged his coffee from the carrier. The casual touch felt like forgiveness, or an allowance. Riley followed at a more sedate pace and rolled his eyes at Andrew, collapsing onto his usual chair in a petulant pile of tawny limbs.
“You’re not psychic, man, you’re something else entirely. Especially if that book is right,” he said.
Sam grunted, not agreement or argument. The golden, sun-scattered kitchen was homey. Nothing cast a real shadow. Andrew picked up his own coffee, paler brown than the two straight black pours, and took one sip. “Has it occurred to either of you that you’re not the only ones worried?” Riley asked. He kicked one foot up onto the table. “I’m real worried. This whole time I’ve been acting as the voice of reason and restraint for both of you, and now you’re treating me like a kid trying to eat dish soap.”
“That was one time, but it was memorable,” Sam shot back with deflecting humor.
“Shut up, dude, I’m not joking,” Riley said.
“We’ll be fine,” Andrew said. “What are you worried she could even do to the two of us, in broad daylight?”
“Arrogance,” Riley said, “is not attractive.”
“She’s a professor, she’s pushing late sixties, her husband is wasted to skin and bones, and she has no idea if we told someone where we were going,” Andrew said.
“Even so, you’re the only one of us who has aspirations, some goals and shit,” Sam gestured with his coffee. “I’d rather we triage according to who’s got the most to lose.”
Riley groaned, “As if you�
��re not worth worrying over, you dick. Text me the entire fucking time, please.”
Sam tapped Andrew on the ass with the flat of his hand. Riley barked a laugh at the startled glance Andrew shot him. Sam ducked out the back door before Riley finished chuckling. Outside, Sam spun on his heel and walked backward toward the WRX, maintaining a steady and damning eye contact. Andrew followed, messenger bag thumping against his thigh, heavy with notebooks and the monograph; all of Eddie’s research that he thought might be relevant to a conversation with Troth.
Once in the car, Andrew asked, “You sure about doing this with me?”
“Don’t say dumb shit. You’re one of mine, Blur, and we’re going to get you sorted out fine, okay?” Sam said as the engine growled to life.
Andrew shut his mouth. One of mine—that had a ring to it, and so did the promise of safety, of being taken in hand. If Riley had tried to slap a label on the thing budding between them, he’d have rejected it out of hand, because nothing encompassed the particular set of feelings he might sum up as owned. What did it mean that he found that comforting, still, now that Eddie was gone?
Anticipatory quiet stretched between them as the trip unspooled ahead, interstate spreading out before them with heat-shimmer as Sam merged onto it. After he hit fourth gear, Sam’s hand slipped briefly from the shifter to wrap around Andrew’s thigh, squeezing once before retreating again. The shape of his palm lay branded there. Spinning thoughts raced through Andrew’s head. The trap he’d set had sprung: the professor calling, dangling a morsel to drag him out to her, hinting at knowledge about Eddie’s death. He’d made her desperate. Maybe, in that desperation, she’d done some research of her own that had set her on the same trail as him—and that was his most generous interpretation.
“They said her husband’s relapse was recent, at the faculty party.” Andrew shared the thought as he happened upon it. “Wonder how recent. You think he’d have been strong enough a couple months ago, if he wasn’t as sick?”
“Or he paid someone,” Sam said. “A family like the Troths would have the money.”
Andrew gnawed the edge of his thumbnail, bitten almost to the quick. “I don’t feel like this should fall into our lap so easy.”
“Nah, but maybe we can use her, if she isn’t bullshitting us for her own reasons,” he said.
Andrew nodded. A muffled cloak of unreality settled over him as their pleasant sunny drive took them farther from Nashville, mimicking an afternoon excursion. Green forest and fields on either side of the highway were split up with billboards, exits to suburbs and neighborhoods, truck stops with McDonald’s attached. Even driving toward the Troth land, so close to Townsend, he had never felt further from the stifling horror of the caverns. A mad part of him wanted to beg Sam to pull over, get out and take in the scenery, have a quick fuck in the dirt and grass.
But he said nothing. The work he’d done, that the cousins had helped him with despite their misgivings and his intractability, crumbled like dry soil through his fingers when he tried to mold it into a logical whole. Looming at the center of a set of jagged spokes sat the curse, connected to the hollers and to the university alike, thanks to Eddie—to study carrels and double-wide trailers and interstates at night. The curse was his and Eddie’s bond; maybe it was an answer too, if he found the right question and put it to the right person.
“I got your text last night,” Andrew said as the road continued to unspool ahead.
Sam hummed, noncommittal.
“He’s dead, Sam.”
“I know that. He’s not gone, though. Look at us right this minute. Half the conversations we have, he’s in them. I was going to fuck you wearing his ring on your wedding finger.”
The hot flash that washed over him held discomfort and hunger in equal measure.
“Sorry—” he started.
“Don’t be,” Sam cut him short. “It’s a choice I made, getting in this thing with you, whatever it is. But don’t mistake me, I’m not interested in filling in for a ghost.”
“You aren’t,” Andrew said.
Inadequate, but a start all the same.
Sam took the exit suggested by the GPS and Andrew stopped chewing his cuticles, the faint taste of blood in his mouth. After another few minutes of coasting past unoccupied, verdant land, the Troth house rose up at the end of its paved drive, cream and yellow. Less imposing in the daytime, though still grand. The restless dead of the estate lay sleeping under the sunlight. The WRX rolled to a stop in front of the veranda’s broad steps.
“Damn,” Sam said, an arm draped over his steering wheel to peer out through the windshield. “Big-ass house she’s got.”
“Come in with me,” he said.
“No shit.” Sam got out and popped his back, rolled his shoulders. His nervous energy had a feral tint. “I don’t trust her.”
They mounted the steps all the same, Sam a prowling creature one step behind him. A multitoned, mellifluous doorbell chimed when he pressed the button. The tall wood door swung open mere seconds later, as if Troth had simply been waiting a few feet away in the sitting room for him to arrive. Wearing a lilac sweater with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, Troth blinked, sun-dazzled, at the two young men on her porch.
“Hello, Andrew. And who’s this?” she asked.
“Sam Halse.” He offered his hand to shake.
She took it with a professional firmness as Andrew said, “Riley Sowell’s cousin. We’re planning to run an errand in this neck of the woods afterward, so he came with.”
“I understand,” she said, stepping aside to welcome them in with a sweeping wave.
“What did you find?” Andrew asked.
Troth’s mouth flattened into a frown. Her thin face was bare of makeup and carried a small collection of fine lines and summer freckles.
“Come with me,” she said.
Sam glanced at him for confirmation as she turned into the grand hall; Andrew nodded assent. She led them deep into the house, their sneakers squeaking across the polished wood floor. Sam cast Andrew a puckered grimace at the sight of the chandelier overhead. The trio stopped in an extravagantly furnished kitchen with a large Chemex steaming on one marble countertop, coffee silken and almost black in the sun pouring from the bay of windows overlooking the yard. A glazed blue-and-purple ceramic mug sat to one side, prepared just on time, an impeccable hostess despite the circumstances. Troth gestured them to the table and rummaged for two more mugs in her cabinet, looping her fingers through the handles as she grabbed hers from the counter.
“Cream, sugar?” she asked.
“Cream, if you could,” Sam said.
His accent thickened when he was being polite, maybe in response to being so sorely out of place in his grease-flecked boots among the finery. Andrew took the seat across from him and rested one forearm on the blond wood while Troth, in her immaculate leisure outfit, poured them each a generous serving. It occurred to him with an uncomfortable shock that he had the funds to step into a life like this, spending afternoons off in a historic home, lazing in the air-conditioning and drinking fancy coffee with cream poured from a tiny ceramic carafe.
Sam didn’t. His face telegraphed the fact.
Troth pushed their finished coffees toward them across the tabletop before claiming the seat across from them. She warmed her palms on her mug, glancing from Andrew to Sam. “Are you all right with me discussing this in company, or would you rather we do so alone?”
“He’s okay to talk in front of,” Andrew said.
Troth nodded and sipped. Andrew did the same. The coffee, hot and bitter, stung his mouth. She was pushing for time, he realized. Sorting her words.
“When his health began deteriorating again, Mark developed a fascination with folktales dealing in methods for staving off death.” Her tone approached clinical, gaze resting on neither of her guests but on the far wall. “I understand his reason. It breaks my heart, of course—how could it not? But I do understand.”
“And how does t
hat connect to Eddie?” Andrew prompted her.
“I believe the Fulton curse might have been of greater interest to Mark than was good for him, and I was unaware that he and Edward had been in contact without me,” she said. “I found books I recognized from Edward’s reports, copious notes in Mark’s hand. The tone in the notes is not appropriate. I thought you should see for yourself; I’m not able to be objective.”
“Okay, I’ll look them over,” Andrew said.
“In a moment,” Troth said. “This is very difficult for me. He’s upstairs, sleeping. I can’t imagine him harming someone, but I will feel responsible for him if he pushed Edward too far in a fragile state.”
Andrew’s biceps bunched and his free hand flexed into a fist on his knee under the table. She might be lying or stretching the truth—he didn’t doubt she’d do anything to protect her husband. He held his breath to keep from charging straight up the staircase to drag a dying man out of his bed. And he wasn’t sure he believed her version of events, either.
Troth said to Sam, “I apologize for the distraction from your afternoon. Do you want something else to drink?”
Sam tipped his mug for a long swallow and said, “Coffee’s good, thank you.”
“To the library, then?” Troth asked.
“Yeah,” Andrew said. He finished the dregs and set his mug on the table. “Sam, I’ll be back in a minute.”
Troth’s tense posture loosened. She motioned for him to follow, and he cut narrowed eyes to Sam as she turned away. Sam nodded as they left the room. Andrew thought he might fare better than Riley at slipping through the vast, underoccupied ex-plantation without being noticed. Troth glanced over her shoulder as she opened the doors to the library, and despite the manicured cleanliness of the house, a crawling grime washed over Andrew. He stepped across the threshold.
It was a windowless room. Lamps glowed white and harsh in each corner, illuminating paired plush reading chairs and three walls of built-in bookshelves. In the center of the room, a glass-topped display case stood—ornate, heavy-paneled, antique. Troth padded across the twilight-purple rug. The corner of the display case held an irregular stack of books with a familiar monograph on top, and as he approached, he saw that the glass protected a collection of heirlooms: combs, a worn Bible, folio-bound papers. A disarticulated set of human finger bones. Mourning hair lockets fizzing with malevolence, an old knife with a pitched aura of darkness seeping off of it. The hair rose on the back of his neck; he braced a hand on the lacquered wood. Troth touched his knuckles.