by Kit Reed
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For David
CHAPTER 1
Dell
“I happened to be in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d drop by.”
Not a line that gets you in the door no questions asked, Dell knows. Not on this street in this drab urban wasteland where the city swallowed the neighborhood whole and moved on, leaving a trail of ruined streets flanked by overgrown parking lots and tin sheds and mutilated houses—all but the one he is approaching.
He is here for a reason. Whenb they returned his clothes the day the doctors cleared him, the pockets were empty except for this index card. It fell out of the sagging tweed jacket stuffed into the top of the plastic bag. It reads,
553 MAY STREET
JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA
It’s all he has of his past life. This and the flash drive. The thing slid out of his shoe while he was dressing, so sleek that his first instinct was to smash the object like a scorpion. Instead he shoved it into the jacket; he got dizzy looking at it, and it wasn’t just the head injury. He couldn’t throw it away; he couldn’t have it in his life. By the time it ate its way through the lining, he’d collected so much stuff that he had a dozen places to stash it. He needs to bury the damn thing.
Maybe here, at this address.
Something about 553 shouts, home, although it looms like a dowager queen waiting for him to explain himself. With its fluted columns and French windows coated with grit, the once white house looks like Tara, all used up and kicked to the curb. The row of trees to the right does nothing to hide the dented metal shed on the seedy parking lot that replaced another big house. To its left, a brick veneer front with combination windows hangs like a mask on an ex-mansion, with external fire escapes clamped on the sides to bring it up to code. A sign sunk in the green cement signifying lawn reads: MARVISTA.
Apartments, boardinghouse or crack motel? He doesn’t know. Is this even the right neighborhood? He rubs the grit off a brass plate bolted to the gate in front of Tara here. It reads: 553 May Street, and underneath, Ellis. Reflexively, he fingers the frayed index card he’s carried ever since the doctors signed off on him and the cab company settled his bill. He left the hospital in clothes returned in the regulation plastic bag marked with his room number. The frayed tweed jacket, the shirt, the canvas boots looked strange to him. It’s all strange. The taxi that hit him knocked everything out of his head.
Fretting, he went through the pockets: no wallet, no ID, no glasses, just an unmarked envelope stuffed with small bills—payoff, he supposes— and this index card with the address in black ballpoint. He’s carried it for so long and studied it so closely that he doesn’t need to look.
Yep. This is the place.
Dell can’t tell you exactly why he’s at the Ellis family’s front gate. Unless he won’t. He is either a godsend or a threat to the women living in the house, and. This is bad. He doesn’t know which. The taxi knocked everything out of his head except the guilt.
Dell is not his real name. He grabbed this one off the wall like a hat off a hook. “Dell,” he told the others holed up in the gulch below the overpass where he bedded down when he reached Jacksonville. You don’t just walk in and put down your stuff without some kind of introduction. He liked the way it sounded. No last name. Dell was good enough for them. Look at it this way. Who, temporarily sleeping in a mess of cartons, wants to give up his particulars to guys who might give him up to the guys out looking for him.
“My name is Dell.” Dell what? To be determined. It’s past time to pick up a last name and put it on. No point scoring new ID until he can pay for that fake license, fake SSN, but still. He’s highly qualified, but he hasn’t had a real job since the accident. He used to be good at what he did. Tech, he thinks, but the details blurred somewhere between there and here. Situational amnesia?
Look. There are things a man needs to forget. He doesn’t really want to talk about the psychic train wreck that spilled him out here in the shadow of the interstate, where he showers at the Y as often as he can and takes care of the rest whenever. Not yet. Maybe the rest will come back to him when he penetrates this old ark.
If he really wants to know who he is, and that’s what bothers him.
Open the damn gate, stupid, go up on their fancy steamboat porch and knock on that door like a man, and when they ask you in, let them tell you what you’re doing here. Check out the interior through that beveled glass and work on your damn smile while you wait for them to come. Smile. Whoever you used to be, people liked you. Talk your way in.
Then what? Not sure.
Dell may not know why he’s here, but he spent weeks researching the occupants before he marched out today. The Ellis family owns 553. Have done ever since Dakin Ellis, the paterfamilias or whatever, broke ground in 1888 and built this heap for his new wife. It’s in all the city directories between then and now, and he checked every one. It gave him a sense of purpose. He moved on to a library PC with greasy keys, searched every Web reference to the family and followed up with visits to local historical societies, museums, decaying files in the belly of the Jacksonville Journal.
Procrastinating? Pretty much.
Jacksonville pioneers, the Ellises, one of the city’s first families, with too many men lost to notable accidents and untimely deaths. In its own way that’s creepy, and the creepiest thing? Their old world shifted and the neighborhood went from seedy to dangerous, but there are three old women still in the house like clueless passengers wondering why all the deck chairs are sliding downhill. He needs to get in there and find out what brought him to this old ark.
And he can’t get past the ornamental iron gate. It isn’t locked. It’s him.
Dell backs into the shade of their big live oak and considers. Scope the territory, he decides. Look for a way in and when you find it, leave. Let the rest come later.
It had damn well better!
He didn’t expect to be in Jacksonville this long. He slouched into this overgrown city months ago, looking to locate the address on this card and figure out what comes next. Instead he retreated into research, the perfect paradigm for what he is right now: all movement, no action. In late summer it was like walking the ocean bottom with the whole Atlantic on his back. Fall here was easy but in northern Florida, even winter is harder than he thought. It never snows, at least he doesn’t think it does, but it’s too cold to sleep in the elbow of the overpass. The other guys moved out weeks ago but until last night, he temporized. It was the first frost.
Even his teeth got cold. Whatever he has to do inside this old heap, he’d better get started. He enters through a gap in the hedge and darts for the ornamental shrubs below the long front porch with its grimy rockers and dead plants overflowing cement
urns. The jumble of hibiscus and bougainvillea is so thick that a person coming out the front door might or might not hear something, but she won’t see him running along below. He rounds the corner and drops into a crouch, looking for a basement window. He won’t know that the first Dakin Ellis built this place like a plantation house in flood country, with an unbroken foundation: proof against high tides on the St. Johns River— in sinkhole territory, which Dakin didn’t know.
Safely behind the house, Dell steps away to study the back. A long porch runs the width of the house, with stairs coming down from the kitchen to ground level. The main business goes on above his head, on the sprawling first floor of the Ellis house. There are three rusty lawn chairs on the back porch, a weathered table and an old Kelvinator, leftover red wagon, ancient tricycle. Down here, lattice hides whatever goes on within.
Basement windows. Basement door, Dell supposes, with everything in him running ahead to winter. Openings just waiting to be cracked. He’ll find one where he can come and go without being seen and stake out a place. Then he waits. Until. The thought drops off a cliff. He can’t go there. Yet.
Feeling his way along the lattice, Dell moves into the long shadow of the back steps. Here. Hinges in the lattice at the point where the stairs intersect the porch. This part opens and shuts like a secret door. He raises the latch and ducks inside.
As he does, a scrap of Dante comes back to him: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” For one riveting second, his blood stops running. Words drop into his head like ice cubes, Get out before it’s too late. What?
Hell with it! This new squat is everything he hoped. Big. He could roll in a Harley, if he had one. Furnish the place if he wanted, and they’d never know. Late afternoon sunlight slants in. He turns off his flash. He’s a spy, safe behind enemy lines.
Then why is every hair on the back of his neck standing up?
The place is dead clean. The floor is bald, as though enemies torched the crops and salted the earth before they moved on. There’s no door into the main basement that he can find; no damn windows! To his left, a cement rectangle spreads in front of cast-iron laundry sinks backed up to the brick foundation, with, yep, streaks of lime and rust. The faucets are still dripping, so, cool. His new squat may be cold but there’s running water here. He can bundle newspapers for insulation, lug in an extension cord long enough to reach the garage and Dumpster-dive for a space heater. Soon, when the December sun drops before 5 P.M., he’ll come back with his stuff and move in.
Stop temporizing, asshole.
Tonight.
Then he can take his time finding a guy who dupes driver’s licenses to document his identity: license and a Social. He’ll be Dell-Something. Maybe his real name will come back to him. Is that a good thing? Probably not, but he’s sick of winging it. All he has is this index card. He forgets, but he can’t leave off grieving over whatever came down back then. Worse, he can’t bring back anything about it but this shit feeling of guilt that clings like tar that you rolled in on purpose. You can’t get it off.
He was probably fucked up before the taxi hit him, but when his skull broke, everything he knew leaked out into the street. Dell doesn’t know what he did or who he’s hiding from. It’s either selective amnesia or it isn’t. Split personality, maybe, good Dell/bad Dell like the guy in that movie?
No. Dell is afraid of what he did. No. Of what he might do if they found out.
Whatever, here he is in Jacksonville, Florida, broke and temporarily homeless, with an uncertain welcome in the house above. At least he’s come to the right address, but he doesn’t know who wrote it on the card for him and stuffed it into the jacket. Or if it’s really his jacket.
Ignorant but hopeful, he’s here.
Dell squats in the gray Florida dirt, considering. He’s a decent-looking guy, he keeps himself neat. For all he knows, he has every right to walk into this house. He can walk in and they’ll know him. One of the old ladies will say. Will say …
OK, what? Thank God you’ve come? Hey, he could be the missing heir, a genuine Ellis whelp with a valid claim to some scrap of life here on May Street.
Unless, unlike Dell, they know what he did and they call the cops. They’ll double back on the— and the word smashes into him like an eighteen-wheeler— atrocity.
Atrocity?
Don’t go there. Think: prodigal son.
Unless you have … Dell snaps to, riveted. Special powers.
The lattice pops open. “Are you in there?”
He stands so fast that his head smacks a beam. “Holy crap!”
“Come out or I’ll call the cops.” It’s a kid.
Dell picks a splinter out of his forehead. Barks. “Building inspector, there’s an issue with the basement.”
A sound comes out of the kid: pfuh. “They don’t have fucking basements in Florida, I’m coming in.”
Make up some story, do it fast. “Hazmat issue, stay out!”
“Give up, asshole, I live here.” He’s inside, the arrogant little pest. Twelve, maybe. Sweet face for a garbage-mouth, scuzzy wild hair. Confrontational. “Who the fuck are you?”
They are more or less face-to-face here; he has to answer. “Dell.”
“Dell what?”
Think fast. “Duval,” Dell says. It is an inspiration. He adds, “Of the Jacksonville Duvals. I think we may be related, but I don’t want to bother them until I’m sure.” Questions chase each other across the kid’s face like an LED banner. Think fast. “Does your mom know you hang out down here?”
That face: yeah, she doesn’t. “She says it’s haunted.”
“So you’d better beat it, right?”
“No shit. This ancestor Teddy got on fire down here back in the day. It took out half the porch before they got to him.”
It is not safe.
What? “You’d better go.”
No way. He has an audience. “Too late for this kid Teddy. Aunt Rosemary says he screamed forever but shiftless Vincent got to him too late.”
“Who?”
“Vincent. He was Biggie’s husband? She did all the wash. And the aunts are all, ‘Biggie could have put that fire out but no, she was upstairs in the kitchen, boiling water. Why didn’t the stupid girl run down and throw it on that fire?’ Down here they always blame black people.” He snorts. “But, shit! Berzillion years, and they still can’t let it go!”
“Who can’t?”
“The aunts.”
That would be Ivy Ellis, eighty-five, Rosemary Ellis Deering, eighty-one and Iris E. Worzecka, eighty-one, according to the new City Directory, City of Jacksonville: same girly names as the ones listed in the 1908 directory at this same address. Generations of sentimental Southerners, he supposes, passing down names like the family jewels.
“It happened right here where they poured the cement.”
“How do you know?”
“Aunt Ivy obsesses. She’s all instant replay, plus moral. Like, don’t play with matches, kids…”
Dell sighs. So they pass down stories too. “You should go.”
“She can’t help it, I guess.”
Overhead, a screen door slams. Dell’s gut clenches. “Hear that? They’re looking for you.”
There are no footsteps; just the sound of rubber wheels going back and forth on the boards above and a woman’s anxious, hollow shout, “Who’s down there?”
“I’m named for him. Is that creepy or what?”
“Teddy? Is that you?”
“Don’t call me Teddy!” He goes all guttural, whispering, “He was only three years old.”
“Better hurry.” Dell opens the hatch, as though that will make him go.
But the kid hangs in place, gnawing his knuckles. “Teddy’s fucking dead, lady. I’m Theo. Theo Hale.”
“Come on up here right now, you hear?”
Dell plays on their being in his secret place. “Quick, before she catches you.”
“No way, that’s just Aunt Ivy. She can’t.”
&nb
sp; Ivy Ware Ellis, eighty-five. “That’s what you think.”
“She’ll never make it. Dakin Junior’s racking horse reared up and fell over backward on her, like forever ago. She’s a cripple, man.”
Ivy’s voice goes up a notch. “What are you doing down there, Teddy Hale?”
The kid gnaws his knuckles until he draws blood.
“Fooling around in the dark with God knows who.”
Dell says, “Why are you so nervous?”
She cries, “It isn’t safe!”
The answer comes up like phlegm. “It’s a fucking trap!”
“This place?”
“The whole house. Look what happened to that kid!”
Dell nudges him toward the exit. “You should go.”
“Theodore Hale, you answer me!” On the porch the sound of wheels stops. She’s directly overhead.
“Beat it.” Dell is surprised by the thud of a gravity knife in his palm— his knife, he supposes, no blade showing, just the big bone handle. Thump.
“No way.”
“Really.” She’s so close that the base of Dell’s spine twitches. One flick and the knife turns deadly. “Go.”
“Fuck that.” Theo whirls on him, all spit and fury. “Your ancestor didn’t burn up down here. You go.”
“Theodore Ellis Hale!!! Who’s down there?”
Thump. “Now.”
“Nobody, Aunt Ivy, OK?” Frantic, he repeats, “Three years old.”
“Come out before I send Vincent down after you.”
“They were all pissed at Vincent because he couldn’t get close enough to put the fire out. Like he was fucking stalling.”
She doesn’t exactly shriek. “Did you hear me?”
But the kid is in love with his recital. “And that’s not the worst thing that happened in this house.”
Go before I hurt you. Dell releases the blade with a snap. “Tcha!”
“OK, OK, but just so you know…” Shaken, the kid exits the hatch. After a two-second beat he sticks his head back in, all bloated and rasping like a demon in a bad movie. “This house is under a curse.”