The Thing in the Alley (Anomaly Hunters, Book 3)

by J. S. Volpe

4

  After everyone had gone home, Calvin spent a while putting the leftovers away and cleaning up. Then he went to the spiral staircase, intending to head up to the office and look for a copy of the trust and perhaps find a clue to the mystery of the inexplicable inheritances.

  He began to ascend, then paused, one foot on the stairs’ bottom step and one hand on the wrought-iron railing, and looked around.

  From here in this central circle that flung out branches to the house’s every extremity, he could see down each of the first floor’s four wings to the four entrances. And the coiling black staircase beneath his hand and foot reached all the way from the basement’s cold concrete floor to the wooden rafters at the top of the tower. From here, he could touch and sense the entire sprawling house, all twenty-eight rooms, Turner May’s mad creation engulfing him like that great biblical fish with little Jonah in its belly.

  The utter silence only made the house seem vaster and Calvin tinier and more alone. Surely something in the house must be making noise, the tick of a clock, the hum of the refrigerator, the crack and pop of old boards settling, but here at the center of it all he couldn’t hear a thing, and the silence freaked him out. He was used to living in a college town, where even in the dead of night something noisy was underway, whether music or traffic or drunken lovers breaking up at the tops of their lungs in the room next door. But now here he was, all alone in a huge old house, shielded from the nearest road by a couple hundred feet of woods, all of it situated in the middle of a quiet suburb where even the pizza places were shuttered and dark by ten p.m.

  To make matters worse, the house was, or seemed to be, one of the main nodes on a strange magical network of misfortune. The house had been built on the ashes of a previous one and most of that previous one’s occupants. Anna May had succumbed to the flu in a room upstairs; Calvin didn’t know which one and wasn’t sure he wanted to. Randolph Crow had no doubt raced through the very spot Calvin now occupied on his way to blow his brains out next to the Stone Pillar in the woods. And there were other incidents over the long years, so many others, all the way down to the death of Mr. May himself, who had succumbed to a stroke just down the hall next to the front door, right in front Calvin’s panicked eyes.

  The memory of Mr. May helped brush away Calvin’s sudden and unaccustomed unease. Mr. May had chosen Calvin to be his successor, and Calvin vowed to ensure that the choice had been a good one. What kind of a paranormal investigator would he be if he let himself get spooked by a stereotypical Old Dark House? Besides, Mr. May had lived alone here for decades without any apparent trouble. If Calvin hoped to fill his mentor’s shoes, he could do no less. He had to get used to silence and shadows. They came with the job.

  He headed up to the office, shut the door behind him, and sat down in the high-backed office chair behind the desk. The chair creaked under his weight, and there was a faint hiss of air as the pneumatic seat settled a millimeter or two.

  Before starting his search for the trust documents, he spent a moment looking around the room. The office and the master bedroom were the two rooms in the house most sharply stamped with Mr. May’s personality. They were also the two rooms Calvin would have to most thoroughly restamp with his own personality, since they were where he would probably wind up spending the bulk of his time. Which meant that very soon he would have to decide what to do with everything in here.

  Calvin’s gaze roved over the room’s contents, taking in the fifteen-year-old Hewlett-Packard on the desk; the jumble of papers and sundry office supplies that littered the desktop around the computer; the bookshelves bowed beneath the weight of hefty reference books, many of them bristling with bookmarks; the map marked with the pentagram and the black pin; and on the wall directly opposite the map, a framed poster for a 1950s movie called The Terrible Dr. Eris, the image showing a huge, leering face and a pair of hooked hands looming in the darkness above a brawny he-man and the buxom blonde cowering behind him. Calvin had always been baffled by the poster, an odd possession for a man who had evinced no sign of being a movie buff and hadn’t owned a single DVD or videotape that wasn’t in some way connected with the Collection. A couple of years ago Calvin had tracked down a copy of the movie, hoping it would provide some insight into the mind or history of Mr. May. The film turned out to be a real obscurity that had never been released on DVD, and Calvin wound up shelling out a ridiculous amount on eBay for an old, battered VHS copy released in the 80s. A substandard crime/horror thriller with a few sci-fi touches, the film concerned the efforts of a detective and the beautiful ingénue who hired him to unravel the secrets of the girl’s mad scientist uncle, who, it turned out, had found a way to remotely control people’s minds and was using this power to stage a coup in the United States. Calvin had scanned every credit at the end of the movie, wondering if Mr. May himself had had a hand in its production, but he saw no names he recognized. The actors and crew had been third-raters, the sorts of folks whose profiles on Imdb sported brief filmographies and no photographs. In the end Calvin came away baffled as to why Mr. May had liked the movie enough to hang its framed poster in a spot where he would see it nearly every day. Perhaps the movie had simply held some kind of nostalgic relevance for the old man.

  Calvin’s gaze returned to the desktop, and he idly flipped through a few of the topmost papers. A printout about the stratigraphy of the Grand Canyon. A brief letter from somebody named Albert about the recent doings of somebody named Jack. A flier from the May Library about an “upcoming” book sale that was over five years in the past. A page of notes in Mr. May’s tiny, crabbed handwriting that Calvin could only slightly decipher but that seemed to be a list of land parcels in Phoenix Township and their owners. He was going to have to sort through this stuff soon.

  For that matter, he would have to replace the computer. He had turned it on once and was both appalled and amused to find that it was running Windows 98. It looked as though Mr. May had barely used the computer for anything other than online research. He hadn’t even had an email account as far as Calvin could tell. Calvin’s own computer was currently stashed in the game room. Once he sorted through this mess on the desk, he’d set it up in here.

  But that would have to wait till later. Right now he had more important work to do.

  He wheeled the chair over to the file cabinets along the east wall, where Mr. May kept his various non-Collection documents. None of the small metal frames on the fronts of the drawers held labels to identify their contents. Calvin grabbed the handle of the nearest drawer, then paused and took a breath.

  “Hope this isn’t where you kept your secret porn stash,” he muttered to Mr. May’s shade. “If so, I apologize in advance.”

  He opened the drawer and found nothing more exciting than manila folders crammed with old utility bills, bank statements, and brokerage statements. A riffle through the latter two folders left Calvin feeling almost dizzy at how much money Mr. May had had. Even without a calculator he could tell that collectively the various accounts had added up to close to eight figures.

  The next drawer contained care manuals and instruction manuals for various appliances, gadgets, and furniture, many of them objects that, to the best of Calvin’s knowledge, Mr. May had no longer owned when he passed away. A Victrola? None of those around here anymore, unless one was hidden amid the maze of junk that filled two rooms in the basement. A 1956 Desoto Fireflite convertible? At the time of his death the only car Mr. May had owned was the Thunderbird in the detached garage out back. Why had he kept all these useless manuals? Sentiment? Nostalgia? Or maybe his globe-trotting anomaly-hunting lifestyle hadn’t left him the time to clean out old folders.

  Calvin moved on to the next drawer.

  Bingo. Right there at the front of the drawer was a three-ring binder marked “Trust (Current).” Behind it were manila folders that contained older versions of the trust.

  Calvin pulled the whole bundle of documents from the drawer. Since he couldn’t set them anywhere on the paper
-heaped desk without risking an avalanche, he sat back in the chair with the folders in his lap and began to read through the trusts in chronological order.

  The oldest version of the trust dated all the way back to 1960 and in it Mr. May had left half a million dollars and most of his property, including the Collection, to somebody named Chad Chapman. Lesser amounts went to various other people, including an Albert Korowicz and a Jack Fivecrows, whom Calvin surmised might be the same Albert and Jack mentioned in the letter on the desk.

  A new trust was written up in the spring of 1969, this one leaving everything—every last cent and nail—to someone named Alma R. Munsen.

  The next trust came only two months later, and this one was very similar to the original one, except that Chad Chapman’s place was now taken by Ellen Gardner, who in the original trust had received fifty thousand dollars, while Mr. Chapman himself was demoted to receiving only ten thousand dollars and an antique Bible. There was no mention of Alma R. Munsen anywhere.

  The next version dated to 1985. In it the Collection and the house were left to one Michael Hawthorne. Calvin wondered if this wasn’t the same Mike whom Mr. May had once mentioned as having helped him procure some of the items in the Collection. Beyond that, various changes had been made to the various bequests, no doubt to reflect the passing of old friends and the acquisition of new ones. Ellen Gardner was no longer listed, but a Melody Gardner, who had been a beneficiary in all of the previous trusts except the Alma Munsen one, was still slated to receive fifty thousand dollars.

  Another version was made in 1996, this time with only minor amendments. Michael Hawthorne still received the Collection and the house.

  Then came November 2008 and a radically new trust. A number of old names were no longer mentioned. The ones who remained received the same or lesser amounts. Michael Hawthorne received an original tin sign from the May-Crow Brewery and fifty thousand dollars.

  Calvin, who had not been mentioned in any previous trust, received one hundred thousand dollars. So did the likewise previously unmentioned Anna West and John Coyote. Ditto every member of the Crow family with the exception of Emily Crow.

  Emily Crow received the Collection, the house, and one million dollars.

  Frowning, Calvin did the math. Emily would have just turned seven.

  There was also one other recipient of a hundred thousand dollars (along with, oddly enough, a volume of Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales) who had not been mentioned in any previous trust. This was someone named Tiffany Fish.

  Calvin had never heard of her.

  The final version of the trust was the one Mr. May had made the day before he died. In it, he added Violet’s comparatively small bequest, and, more importantly, switched Calvin’s and Emily’s bequests, so that Emily received one hundred thousand dollars, while Calvin received the house, the Collection, and one million dollars. By then Emily had been missing a few days and, although no one had been willing to say so at the time, almost certainly dead. What’s more, some of Mr. May’s comments and actions at the time suggested that he knew he didn’t have much time left to live, which made an amendment to the trust imperative. If Mr. May died and Emily remained missing, the Collection could have been held up in legal limbo forever.

  But still, why had he left it to Calvin? Why not one of the other Crows? Why not Melody Gardner, or Albert Korowicz, or someone else Mr. May had known all his life? Calvin liked to think it was because the old man had seen some reflection of himself in Calvin, seen a worthy successor to his life’s work. But the truth was, Calvin would probably never know.

  Perhaps the most important question of all was what had happened during or before November 2008 that compelled Mr. May to rearrange his legacy so dramatically. Why would he leave the Collection to a seven-year-old girl? Why would he leave even a hundred thousand dollars to Calvin when, to the best of Calvin’s recollection, they had never even met? Somehow Mr. May must have known who he was. Perhaps the old man had been watching him—watching all of them—for years. But why?

  Calvin looked up at the movie poster on the wall, at that huge, leering face looming above the crouched and vulnerable couple. Calvin shifted uneasily in his chair, once again acutely aware of the house’s deathly silence and of his solitude.

  He shook his head at himself. Letting himself get spooked out wasn’t going to solve anything. He forced his mind back onto the problem at hand.

  As he looked over the trust again, the year 2008 leaped out at him. Why did that seem so familiar? Someone had just mentioned that year, hadn’t they?

  It took him a moment to remember that it was he himself who had brought up the year when he was talking to Cynthia earlier. That had been the date on the strangely recent battery in Mr. May’s Thunderbird, the car that according to evidence in the later case files, Mr. May hadn’t driven in nearly a decade.

  His excitement over this new connection was short-lived. Though the link was intriguing and suggestive, it didn’t really tell him anything new. It merely reiterated that something significant seemed to have happened in 2008, something that had perhaps compelled Mr. May to drive somewhere. And even then, Calvin couldn’t be certain that the car battery and the amended trust were indeed connected.

  Given the scanty information available there seemed to be no way for Calvin to solve the riddle of the trust. Of course, it was possible that one of Mr. May’s old cronies had the answer, and Calvin supposed he could crack open the Rolodex on the desk and start tracking down Albert Korowicz and Melody Gardner and all the rest of them, assuming any of them were even still alive. But he wasn’t sure he was brave enough to start cold-calling strangers over something like this, and in any case he felt sure that whatever secret lay behind this, it was something Mr. May hadn’t shared with anyone. Calvin remembered Mr. May’s funeral and the curious, assessing looks he had gotten from some of the weird out-of-towners who had shown up. They had been as mystified by Mr. May’s decision as Calvin himself had been.

  But there was one person who was definitely worth tracking down, whether she knew the whys and wherefores or not: Ms. Tiffany Fish. Whoever she was, she had entered these documents at the same time as Calvin and the Crows, so presumably they all shared some larger connection. In all likelihood she, too, would be ignorant of the nature of that connection. But that didn’t matter. She was linked to them somehow, and Calvin was determined to learn who she was. Seeing her name on the shortlist of major beneficiaries in the trust made Calvin feel like an amnesiac uncovering a clue to his unremembered past.

  Setting the folders on the floor, he extracted Mr. May’s Rolodex from the mess on the desk and flipped through it to the Fs, wondering as he did so about the identities of all the people listed therein. The Rolodex was crammed so full the lid would barely shut, and most of the names were ones Calvin didn’t recognize.

  Finally, between “Fiorentino, Giuseppe” (who lived in Milan, Italy) and the now-familiar “Fivecrows, Jack” (who, interestingly, had two addresses listed, one in Flagstaff, the other someplace called the Cactus Gulch Advanced Research Facility), Calvin found what he sought: “Fish, Tiffany and Andrew.”

  They lived at 714 Revere Place in Kingwood. Calvin plucked a Bard County map book from one of the shelves of reference books and looked up Revere Place. It was in southern Kingwood, eight blocks south of where Brad Vallance had been killed the other night. A pretty posh neighborhood, if Calvin remembered right.

  It was convenient that it was so close to the crime scene. Tomorrow, after he and Cynthia had investigated Brad Vallance’s death, they would zip right down to Revere Place and find out whatever there was to find out about the mysterious Ms. Fish.