Mister White: The Novel

by John C. Foster

  She tried the knob but it refused to turn, so she set her coffee cup on the floor and raced downstairs in a great clattering of boots, fetched a butter knife from a drawer in the kitchen and thundered back upstairs, winded by the time she returned.

  Inserting the slim blade between the door and jam, she pressed and wiggled while gently trying to twist the knob until the simple lock gave way. She stepped back as the door swung open with a drawn out screech of hinges.

  “Merde,” she muttered.

  Cobwebs hung down over a steep staircase of dark wood. There was light from above but not much, and she backed away from the open door, unwilling to turn her back on it until she reached her own room where she darted inside, emerging after a moment with the fat candle in her hand. If ever there was a place that should be explored by candlelight, it was the attic behind the red door.

  She lit the candle with a wooden lucifer and licked her fingertips to pinch the match flame out, hissing even as the sulfur spat and the fire died. Holding the candle aloft before her, she ascended the stairs, dust puffing beneath her boots, the steps groaning with sounds as individual as notes of a piano. Her mind was suffused with images of séances and tapping tables where mysterious gusts blew out flames and shrill piano notes floated up through cracks in the stained floor.

  All were washed away as she rose up from the floor into what she knew in her heart was a deadroom.

  Faint streamers of sunlight slanted in through curtained windows set high in one wall above an unmade bed. Dust lay over everything, and when she touched the grayed coverlet, a small puff arose. She pressed her free hand over her nose to repress a sneeze as she turned in place to take in the bedroom. With its dust and vague lighting, it was no more real than the black-and-white horror movies she used to watch in the basement with her father, flickering light rendering the familiar space as fantastical as the imaginary reality on screen.

  A coffee cup rested on one nightstand, the inside black with mold, and there were still hairs trapped in the brush that rested on the dresser alongside an open tube of lipstick that was slowly growing into the wood. She twined a hair around one finger, feeling the woman’s presence despite the lack of upkeep.

  Perhaps that was why the door was locked. The woman was still here.

  In her mind’s eyes, Hedde saw the stack of dusty games on the living room shelf. The long box with the Parker Brothers logo, in which lay the planchette and Ouija board.

  She turned guiltily, feeling the pressure of observation.

  “Is anyone here?” she asked, but there was no response. She walked closer to the dusty photographs in frames, wiping aside gray talc with her fingers to see a beardless Gerard and a woman with honey-colored hair and a wide smile.

  Hedde set the picture back, its resting spot easily rediscovered in the dusty surface, imagining some other Uncle Gerard, someone who could make a woman laugh.

  Blouses and pants were still folded in dresser drawers and mementos of another life were littered about. She wondered why Uncle Gerard had kept them before encountering the frightening question of whether she would be able to throw out the physical memory of a loved one. She who had never held hands, never kissed a boy.

  Hedde closed the drawers, but a moldy, green smell had entered the air and she wondered if keeping these things was healthy.

  The inquisitive part of her mind was keenly aware that she was trying on these emotions in preparation for radical changes in her own life, but that voice was drowned out by the shrieking furies of denial.

  She bent down to look through a grate in the floor leading into a dark room she believed was her uncle’s and was just able to make out another grate on the floor of that room, deciding it had something to do with heating but not entirely sure what. As she straightened she bumped a rocking chair, which obliged her with a satisfying squeak as she approached the bookcase covering one entire wall.

  Her flush of excitement soon faded when she realized that every single book was a mystery. Worse, old lady mysteries. Agatha Christie. Ngaio Marsh. She imagined Uncle Gerard reading about the fussy Belgian investigator and felt an urge to grin in spite of her surroundings.

  These belonged to the lady with the honey-colored hair.

  Hedde ran her finger along the spines of the shelved paperbacks, smoothing them into alignment so that none stuck out farther than the other, before taking one worn volume off the shelf. She sat cross-legged in front of the bookcase, enjoying the musty smell of old paper, a welcome intruder in the stale air of the bedroom.

  “They were Lucy’s,” a voice said.

  Hedde twisted around in surprise to see Gerard’s head just above the level of the floor, features unreadable.

  “I’m sorry—” She started to apologize, but he held up a hand and she went silent, face flushing. She watched his eyes glitter in a slanting beam of light for the count of several breaths until he sighed.

  “Want to meet her?”

  - 2 -

  “It’s mugwort. Can’t believe it survived this far into the season,” Hedde said, placing the small wreath of stem and leaves atop the cold granite headstone. “Sailors used it to clear up asthma.”

  She was babbling but unable to stop as Gerard’s silence deepened. He was crouched in front of the stone with one wind-burned hand splayed against the granite, reading the four carved lines as if unraveling a mystery. She couldn’t bring herself to look at the words. The dates. All she could think about was today, maybe her father’s last, an ocean away. Maybe her mother’s last, gone off somewhere to help dad.

  “I come here once a month or so to check in,” Gerard said, so quiet she wasn’t sure if the words were meant for her. “During the summer, Rich Finnegan doesn’t mind if I help myself to his rake and clippers, keep things neat.” He drew in a big breath and blew it out. “Good guy, Rich.”

  He stood and cast a long shadow over her so she stepped to the side, back into the sunshine. “I know you’re lost at sea, Hedde, and I’m not much for offering comfort.”

  “I—” Hedde bit off the rest of her words, realizing she had nothing to say. It was true. She was lost and Uncle Gerard was about as comforting as a rock.

  Gerard plucked a twenty from the pocket of his jeans. “Less than a half mile that way is Annie’s Book Stop. Might find yourself something better than one of those Agatha Christie’s.”

  She took the offered money and looked at it, then at him. “Will you be okay?”

  “Yes,” he rested his hand on the stone again. “Gonna talk with Lucy for a little while. I’ll come get you at the bookstore.”

  “Okay.”

  “Take Etienne with you.” Gerard stuck two fingers in his mouth and let out a piercing whistle, but they heard no answering bark. “Okay, never mind the dog. I’ll see you in a little bit.”

  Hedde crunched across the snow, careful not to slip where it had been packed down hard on the small road leading into the cemetery.

  Alone.

  Hedde never did make it to Annie’s Book Stop.

  - 3 -

  There wasn’t much to downtown Flintlock, and much of what was there sported boards over the windows and futile FOR RENT signs. It looked to her suburban eye like a place that the future had passed by, but it didn’t quite know it yet.

  A van motored past, Pink Floyd trailing from half-opened windows, and she turned her face away from flying road debris. The street and sidewalks were gritty from salt trucks, and even the wall of snow along the curb was ashy with dirt. A little kid in a hand-me-down snowsuit sat on the ridge of snow, breaking off chunks which he winged side-arm at a house, presumably his. A tuft of insulation escaped from a tear in his sleeve with every throw, floating in the air like an out-of-season milkweed puff.

  Hedde wondered why the kid wasn’t in school and why his mother didn’t tell him to stop throwing ice at the house. He didn’t turn or even seem to notice her as she walked past him, even though she was close enough to snatch off his hat, if she had wished.


  She passed a bar and a place called the Blue Jay Café, Boston Bruins banners in the windows and a row of pickups snuggled up to the curb like so many suckling pigs. Everything was painted in grays or yellowy whites that had all the dirty appeal of nicotine-stained teeth, as if the idea of color were against a local ordinance. She thought of the red door that led to a once-happy attic and knew it had been Lucy’s doing. Color brought into her uncle’s grim world.

  She kicked a chunk of ice ahead of her as she passed an insurance office, the towering two stories of a brick municipal building and the brightly lit Flintlock House of Pizza.

  A poster board sign had been affixed to the building next door. Written in black marker with an arrow pointing at the pizza joint, the sign read PLEASE RESPECT NEIGHBORS AND KEEP NOSE DOWN. Yes, nose. Written in soap inside the House of Pizza’s plate-glass window was TURN IT UP! Score one for pizza and spelling. Hedde suspected she knew who was winning Flintlock’s civil war.

  She stopped to look at the place, inhaling the odors of baking crust, red sauce and cigarettes, all scents of which she approved. It couldn’t be good, definitely not up to New York standards, but she thought she might try convincing Uncle Gerard to pick up a pie for dinner.

  Two boys were smoking cigarettes and leaning against the windows of the pizza joint, faces dotted with acne below shaggy hair cuts, wearing hooded sweatshirts beneath denim jackets. They held themselves as if immune to the cold in the way that New Englanders do, working towards the sullen indifference of folks who have seen other people’s lives on TV while knowing it’s not for them. Even with all of this going for them, Hedde would have normally passed on by, but they were near enough to her age that it satisfied some need for normalcy.

  And they had real cigarettes.

  “Can I bum a cigarette?” Hedde asked as she looked up at them. Tall, rawboned types with narrow features, one clean shaven, one with dark wisps of hair on his upper lip.

  “You smoke?” Peach Fuzz said.

  “My Uncle’s got me smoking his hand rolls, but I’m craving a real one.”

  “Who’s your uncle?” he asked.

  “Gerard Beaumont.”

  The two townies exchanged looks, and the clean-shaven boy held out a pack of Camels. “Knock yourself out.” She noticed that the skin below his right eye was a faded purple and yellow.

  Hedde lipped a cigarette free and leaned in as the boy held out a lighter, hands cupped to protect the flame. She drew in smoke and let it trail from her nostrils with a sigh of relief.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “You gonna be going to FHS?” Peach Fuzz asked.

  “What?”

  “Flintlock High School.”

  “No, I’m just visiting.”

  “Gerard Beaumont,” Black Eye said.

  “Yes, do you know him?”

  Black eye nodded. “Everybody does.”

  “Flintcock ain’t too big,” Peach Fuzz added and both boys snickered.

  “So, you a Mormon?” Black Eye asked, and she shook her head. “You dress like a Mormon.”

  “Or a Jehovah’s Witness,” Peach Fuzz added.

  “No I don’t,” Hedde said.

  “So what are you then?” Black Eye asked.

  “I’m wiccan.”

  “What?”

  And because she thought it would shut them up. “I’m a witch.”

  The two boys glanced at each other again. “No fuckin’ way,” Peach Fuzz said.

  “Yes fucking way,” Hedde said.

  Black Eye pushed off the House of Pizza. “My sidekick here is Ray Childers.”

  “Meetcha,” Ray said, also straightening.

  “I’m Hedde.”

  Black Eye looked her up and down. “So, you wanna see a haunted bridge?”

  “Is it far?”

  “It’s close, and it’s pretty cool,” Ray said.

  “Okay,” she said, falling in beside the two boys as they set off down the sidewalk. She tapped Black Eye on the shoulder.

  “You didn’t tell me your name,” she said.

  He slid the cigarette to the corner of his mouth with a movement of his lips and grinned. “Dickie LaChaise.”

  - 4 -

  They took a turn onto an unplowed road and the walking grew harder, all three of them huffing and puffing from the effort, pushing aside small, whippy branches of trees from the overgrown woods on either side. She studied the towering pines scattered throughout the woods, so unlike the trees back home whose branches became as skeletal as fingers denuded of flesh in winter. Instead, these kept their furry needles and spread over the road like wide green hands gloved in powdered sugar. When they dropped their load of snow, it made a soft thump on the ground.

  Hedde paused and ran fingers along a thin branch sporting bright red berries, considering their attractive coloring and what she was doing out in the woods until Ray said, “Them are poisonous,” and she moved on.

  They took turns crossing a rusty chain hanging across the road with a sign reading NO ENTRY. Dickie offered her a hand but she ignored it, flashing a little too much leg and feeling the chill as she crossed the barrier, wondering if she should just turn around and go back.

  “Is it much farther? My uncle will be waiting for me.” She spoke to the prematurely balding spot on the back of his head, and he didn’t bother to turn as he responded.

  “It’s right here,” Dickie said.

  “Don’t be a wuss,” Ray said.

  She heard a car crackling over ice not far behind her and could smell wood smoke, so she knew she wasn’t far off the main road. Still, she felt isolated amongst the trees, sounds muffled by the snow, breath steaming in the air. In the shade of the trees the cold became more pronounced, slipping fingers into every gap of her clothing. She wished she had a hat. She wished she had gloves. She wished she hadn’t decided to follow two boys to a haunted bridge.

  “So this bridge has been closed for like, fifteen years, right before we were born,” Dickie said. “They were gonna make it into a historical thing—”

  “Landmark,” Ray added.

  “Right,” Dickie continued. “Then it happened.”

  “Fucked up the whole town,” Ray added.

  “There was a big lawsuit but because they were drinking, it got thrown out,” Dickie said.

  They trudged on until Hedde picked up a chunk of snow and threw it past Dickie.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  Dickie turned around and grinned on one side of his mouth as he tossed his cigarette butt into the snow.

  “Six kids died.”

  “Zut alors,” Hedde said.

  “High school kids partying and the bottom collapsed. They hit the river and went right through the ice. Not a single one of them made it out,” Dickie said.

  “They froze,” Ray said.

  “They drowned,” Dickie said.

  “One kid floated all the way to Portsmouth,” Ray said.

  “And it all happened right here,” Dickie said with a sweep of one arm, and Hedde saw it, a long, covered bridge like something from a wall calendar. Its walls were a faded red, with open spaces in place of windows and a cap of white frosting the gently peaked roof. The river gurgled over rocks some twenty feet below, and while it wasn’t terribly wide, it did look deep. A grim fascination tugged at Hedde and she moved past the boys, dislodging small clumps of snow as she pushed aside branches until she was close enough to see into the shaded interior, letting her eyes adjust until she could see the gaping wound in the flooring.

  “No way,” she said.

  “Yes way,” Dickie said.

  “Every kid in town has to go across it, like it’s a secret rule,” Ray said.

  “A ritual,” Dickie said.

  Hedde forced a laugh, shaking her head. “Count me out.”

  “Every kid does it,” Dickie said, and Hedde turned to take in his smirk, his crossed arms.

  “Ah, that would be a nope,” she said.

  “Then show us
your tits,” Dickie said, and Ray laughed.

  Hedde felt something cold gather in her middle as she realized she was trapped between a murderous bridge and the two boys.

  “That’s not funny,” she said.

  “That’s ‘cause I’m not fuckin’ joking,” Dickie said, his eyes glittering like black beads.

  “Christ, you barely even got any,” Ray said. “You should be happy someone wants to see ‘em.”

  “Fuck you,” she said and moved to pass around them, but Ray stepped into her path.

  “Open up your coat,” he said. “C’mon, you know you wanna.”

  Hedde’s vision narrowed as, by some miracle, her mind accelerated to warp speed. She saw herself meeting the boys, relived their brief journey to the bridge, berating herself for being so stupid even as some part of her spiraled down like the drill of an oil well, tapping the darkness in her core. She felt that she could see every greasy pore on their faces, could hear the pulmonary expansion and contraction of the alveoli in their lungs, could feel each one of her own nerve endings like metallic pricks against her skin.

  “Take it off,” Ray said, stepping forward.

  “Your breath stinks,” she said, and shocked both boys when she lunged at Dickie.

  Ancient signals traveled from her brain to her hand and she hooked her fingers into a claw, tearing red furrows down Dickie’s cheek as she charged into him, all the while emitting a siren shriek as she butted him back and bit the hand he used to fend her off, slashing at his eyes but catching an ear as he jerked his head to the side. His eyes bulged with terror, and a string of spit hung from his gaping mouth as he retreated and Hedde overwhelmed him.

  The blow to the back of her head felt strangely soft, and she felt not so much pressure as warmth on her skull as she fell face down in the snow. Something—a boot—struck her side but was largely absorbed by her winter coat as hands grabbed her and flipped her into her back. She looked up with slowly gathering cognition to see Ray shoved aside by a bleeding Dickie, who straddled her and pinned her arms, lips peeled back from his teeth in an animal sneer.