by Kit Reed
“In broad daylight, dude.”
“I said, how do you know?”
“He’s in the store all the time, comes before we’re even open, pisses Gumpy off but money’s money, so he opens up.”
“Money?”
“No big, a few bucks, but it all adds up.”
“So you followed him?”
“Who, me? No way. I’m dumb but I’m not stupid.”
“OK thanks. I have to go.” You’d better. All you have to do now is stand up.
“Dude, you think you’re in a different world up there on May Street, but everybody knows. Old lady from Marvista told us there’s a guy in there, she was in the store the day after they found that body on the fourth floor.”
“Body?”
“You know, last Thursday night.”
That stops me. “I didn’t hear anything.”
“We did. The cops were around. Wife did it. He was asking for it, I guess. They found him in bed with the knife sticking straight up in his chest, her fingerprints, the whole nine, and you didn’t know?”
“Not so much.”
Son of a bitch, he’s sorry for me. “Kid, you ought to get out more.”
“Like you think I don’t try.”
Then he picks up like he didn’t just drag me around the block by my hair. “Anyway, I thought he would be gone. Broad daylight, and, shit!”
“He didn’t, like, kick you out?”
“Fuck no. He was dead asleep. I could of taken his laptop if I wanted. He never even knew that I was there.”
Magazine that old can’t be worth much. I poked him. “OK Dopey” (we’re on a first-name basis now). “Why’d you take the stupid thing?”
He poked me in the gut; I couldn’t help it, I giggled. “So he’d wake up knowing that Dopey was there.”
I poked him back and we did what you do when you’re about the same size and you think you can take him, we wrestled, all knees and elbows thumping the floor every time we rolled. We rolled around cackling until the old man hollered up the stairs and Dopey said, “Beat it. Gumpy never hits but he can hurt you,” so I jumped out the window onto the rusty old fire escape, praying to God that the ladder would slide down.
CHAPTER 28
EXTRACT
Dakin Ellis, his book
April, 1920
I should have died in the war. Europe was in flames. God knows I wanted to go. There is nothing for me here. I wanted us to meet in the trenches, just Randolph and me, never father and son. Two grown men, without portfolio, with no shared past and a common aim. With no history between us, we would win that war together, everything possible because nothing went before.
Lord, how I wanted to hear that shout. I wanted the Greek Recognition scene— Father! Son!— the gratifying smack of flesh on flesh. The past erased, everything resolved. Hope sprang up when Dakin Junior enlisted. Ellis men in the trenches, brothers in arms. Guilt gnaws at me as I write. My namesake was never my favorite son. I would have sold my soul for a chance to fight alongside the boy I lost. Dakin and Randolph, comrades in arms.
That was never possible. There was bad blood between us long before he bolted. I blame Manette.
God knows I wanted to serve, but they wouldn’t let me go. Not the doctors. They would have turned their heads and moved along. Ours was the war to end all wars. We were dying in great numbers, our boys bleeding out on foreign soil. The situation was so dire that they sent everybody to the front.
They forbade me. Not the doctors. It was the women. I blame Manette.
My wife draped disdain in false tears, mewling until the bubble over her mouth popped and words fell out.
“Dakin, you’re too old.”
Never mind what I said. She wasn’t listening.
“Think of your children!” She meant Everett. To Manette, the others were ciphers, and Randolph was a stranger to her.
I raged. I begged.
At last she said what she really meant. “Don’t turn me into a widow, you inconsiderate old…”
“Old what?”
The perfect lady, she would never use the word.
I stamped out of her dressing room, fixed to leave the house.
She left it to her tiresome, superfluous mother to explicate the curse that we both acknowledged but could not name. Old Mrs. Robichaux stopped me at the bottom of the stairs. Frail as she is, she’s strong. She drew me into the first sitting room and closed the double doors before she spoke. “You can’t go. Think of the children. Without you here to stand between Manette and your children, she…”
I never liked her, but she knew. I felt her out. “She what?”
She was beyond speech. I do not like the woman, but unlike her daughter, she is not false. For the first time in her long career here, old Mrs. Robichaux let me see her cry.
“Ma’am!”
“I don’t know what she’d do.”
My wife would what? I didn’t really know, but I knew the old woman was right. Too many unhappy years between us, hundreds of words hurled and returned, mulled and regurgitated, and Manette remains a mystery to me. Without me to see to it, she could take to her bed and leave our youngest to root in the neighbors’ compost heaps for food, or she could just as easily fall into a temper and start beating them.
“Do you understand?” The old lady confronted me, trembling with the effort. She was waiting for me to go on.
For all I knew, the minute I walked out the door my wife would put on her finest and go about collecting men to serve her needs, which have always been a mystery to me. For all I knew, she would court returning heroes in a fit of patriotic zeal. She could go out hunting every night and bring home a silken fancy man. In a lifetime filled with getting and spending, using and discarding, my wife has never revealed what she really needs. With me gone to the war, she would get whatever she thought she wanted, bent on replacing me whether or not I came back, because Little Manette was never happy in this enormous house I built for her, the perfect setting she demanded.
Nothing was ever enough. She wasn’t satisfied in spite of all the Persian carpets, the French brocades, the grand furniture and costly paintings and sculpture that I bought because I thought it would make her happy, for a time.
Mormama waited. I stood there, pondering.
A woman like Manette could just as easily seize on some brute because he was rich and socially prominent. And if he wanted to have his way with our daughters, I have no idea whether she would protest or stand back, discreetly looking the other way because it served her purposes.
I saw Mrs. Robichaux wavering in her tracks— exhaustion, I suppose. I could smell age coming off of her. She was trembling with the effort. She reeked of grief, and for the first time in all the years since she landed on our doorstep uninvited and I uninvited her, I understood.
I admit it was rude. I had our children lined up on the porch that day, and I blocked the door so she would have to listen to what I told them.
“This is your Mormama. One more mama than we need.”
That day she defied me. With her gloved hand, she lifted my hand off the front doorknob, holding it daintily between her forefinger and her thumb. She dropped it, and I let it be. Then she lifted her chin and marched on past, into Manette’s house.
She entered because she was needed and for years now she has hung on, defying her failing body in a brave, constant act of will. In spite of everything, she’s still standing. She is here to keep her daughter in check.
I thought: I was wrong.
She repeated. “Do you understand?”
I did.
To her credit, Mrs. Robichaux never spoke of it, but we both lived with the dreadful possibility of another fire in the bowels of the house.
CHAPTER 29
Dell
“Um, Dell?”
“Shit!” Dell jumps up so fast that the journal flies. It lands on its spine and pages fly out. He lunges for the pieces, trying to pick up everything all at once.
“What’s that?”
/> This kid Theo. Here, where he sleeps. “Nothing!”
“Bullshit, that’s somebody’s diary.”
“It’s mine.” Angry and distracted, Dell lunges here, there in the half-light, retrieving pages, entire hand-stitched signatures, trying to turn the pieces back into what he had.
The kid is swifter than Dell. He grabs the last floating page. “A really old diary…”
“Give it!”
“… like it belongs to the house,” he says, studying the jagged script.
“It’s mine!” Dell snatches the page out of Theo’s hands and clamps it into the book. There.
He awoke with Dakin’s journal on the floor next to his head. He was close last night— what night, was it even night? He was too burned out to deal. He slammed the book. OK, he ran away from it. When? The changing light tells him that it’s late afternoon, but he has no idea how long he slept. He thinks he quit the attic just before dawn, but. Yesterday, or did he sleep through another night— how long has it been?
Too long. Clutching the journal, he flopped facedown on the plastic mat he took off an old glider, and passed out. He woke up with a long groove in his face. He’s been sitting here for at least an hour, but the plastic piping imprint still bisects his cheek. Worse. His brains went out to lunch while he slept, and he can’t get them to come back. It’s like thinking underwater, trying to organize gelid shapes that shift on him every time he thinks he knows what to put where.
“So, did you steal it or what?”
Do what you can. Counterattack. He turns on Theo Hale, a genuine Ellis by blood, which pisses him off right now. “How did you get in?”
“Same as ever, asshole. Whaddiyou think?”
Dell weaves in place, clamping the journal to his chest. His mouth is clogged with grit, even his eyeballs scrape their sockets when he blinks. What hit him so hard when he first picked up the book? A detail he was too fried to parse.
He woke up wired. Now he just has to, has to, he has to— what? Whatever it is, it’s urgent. No time for coffee, no time to eat. He did the necessaries and squatted here. He has to find his place in this book! When he opened the carton, he found Dakin’s journal on top. It was like a message from God. Words flew off the page, words pertaining to him, but it was dark and he was too fried to process them. Intense, he thinks, I was this close, but then this damn kid …
I lost my place!
It all went to hell in the adrenaline rush. “Fuck are you doing here?”
“I came to warn you.”
“Say what?” He clamps down on the book so the boy won’t see that his hands are shaking.
Smug little bastard. Sanctimonious. “If I can get in, anybody could.”
Set your jaw and hang tough. “You think.”
“I know.”
Dell hocks, thinking to spit on the cement at Theo’s feet, but he’s all dried out. Everything is hard. Like making words. “If I were you, I wouldn’t mess with me.”
Theo says, “Did you used to have an old copy of Wired?”
“I have a bunch.”
“Really old one, with this red rhomboid thing on the front?”
Fuck, he should eat. Drunk on too much sleep and dead empty, Dell will say anything to end this. “Probably.”
“Well, you don’t have it any more.”
His head comes up.
“Dopey took it off you while you were sound asleep.”
“Who?”
“Kid I know. I saw it at his house.”
“Never happened. Nobody gets in here.”
“Except me.” Theo drops in a silence like a fifty-pound weight. Then he adds, “You think.”
Mouth like a litter box, gritty and rank. End this. Dell slips one hand into his pocket, locating his knife. “You’re the only one that knows.”
“You wish. If Dopey got in, anybody could. Get it?”
Yep, still there. “Got it. Go.”
Instead, he feints for the journal. “Let me see.”
“No way.”
“It belongs to the house.”
Sleep wiped his hard drive. Scowl. Threaten. “I have a knife.”
“Like somebody sneaked in and stole it.”
Flash the knife. “Beat it!”
“OK, OK.” Theo ducks around the partition that separates his private space from the latticed area under the porch and then sticks his head back in. “I’m just sayin’…”
Sanctimonious little shit. Dell flips his wrist and the blade snaps to. “Now.”
“You gotta be more careful, dude.”
Cautionary little fuck. Stupid, what Dell does then. He flips the gravity knife at the weathered partition, aiming a little to the right of Theo’s head. “Out!”
His aim is dead on and the knife sticks, vibrating in the wood. Dell is lost in space, mesmerized by the hum. The kid vanishes, leaving him to pull it out of the wood. Oh, holy shit. That close.
He drops to his knees by the lattice between his place and the side yard of the Marvista, scratching a hole in the ground. He won’t use the knife. Instead he works slowly, clawing up the dirt like a dog. It becomes important to bury the thing— which he does, finally, horrified by what he accidentally almost did.
That close!
It’s not the kid’s fault that he came at a bad time, Dell knows. It was me. He was riffling through the old man’s journal, looking for something he’s not sure of when, fuck. Theo walked into the middle of a half-formed idea. Whatever Dell discovered about himself, or thought he had discovered, shattered like ice on a pond he has to cross if he wants to survive, leaving him in over his head. Drowning as fragments of the surface that supported him broke up and floated away.
He should be doing a dozen other things right now. Rehydrating, getting his shit together, nerving himself up for another hurried move— Theo’s right, this place is no longer safe for him.
Anybody could come in and find him here. Rob him blind, if that’s what they want, take him back to Rhode Island to face whatever he left behind or drag him off to jail or beat him senseless because he can’t tell them who he’s hiding from and he sure as hell can’t tell them what he did.
He doesn’t even know what’s on the toxic flash drive. Bad, he knows. Why else does it make him puke?
Dell should be packing up his shit and covering his tracks, but he can’t. He has to scour the journal until he finds the entry that smoked him. Somewhere in this mess of densely filled pages, there’s proof.
He belongs here. He’s dead sure of it.
April, 1920
Now, what would Manette do if I had answered the call to war? What would she have done? My own wife, and I didn’t know.
I couldn’t go.
Instead, the war took my sons, and it never gave them back. It took Dakin Junior, whom I loved but never really liked. That boy died a hero at Château Thierry, and it took Randolph— I think. Furious, my Randolph, child and man, he was born with my temper and his mother’s sweet face. He ran away at seventeen; I loved him but we fought each other all our lives together in this house. The last time we fought it was horrendous.
He ran away! My dearest Ran. He was the best and worst of my sons. We fought, and I lost my boy.
He went Over There without my knowledge. I grieve for what I lost. I grieve for him, but to this day, I do not know whether he lived or died.
Dakin Junior came home to rest in Florida soil. We buried my rigid, dutiful, noble namesake in the family plot, next to Teddy, our sad lost child. At least two of my sons are together now, right here in Jacksonville, where I would join them tomorrow, if I could.
But Randolph that I loved so much, who left this house and this city in a tearing rage? I may never know.
He was seen alive after the battle at Belleau Wood, shortly before the Boche surrender. Another boy from Jacksonville, Clay Woodward, brought home an object Randolph handed off to him in the final days of the war. It’s the Spanish piece of eight that I gave Ran on his twelfth birthday. He wore i
t on a chain around his neck and he was proud of it, I know. It made me happy. I could look at him and see the man he would become. He was still wearing it that last night. To my shame, I tried to pull it off his neck during the fight on the houseboat, but he jerked away from me cursing, and jumped over the rail and swam away.
We were both furious. God help me, I shouted into the dark. I hope you drown.
Clay Woodward told me that Ran, my dearest runaway, pulled that same chain over his head at Belleau Wood. Clay brought it home to me. I know the jeweler who sold me the chain; I know the dentist who drilled the hole. Clay says Ran told him to give it to me. I take it as a message but dear God, what was he trying to say?
* * *
Dell ought to be out in the world right now, caffeinating, for crap’s sake, finding decent food. All he’s had since the kid left is half a peanut bar and brackish water from the tap that feeds the abandoned laundry tubs. He needs to get out of his enclosure, go running, anything to straighten out his thoughts and put them back where they belong, but he’s on to something, he thinks. No. He’s sure!
Logic tells him that the entry that haunts him turned up a few pages earlier than this section— or later. He can’t be sure. It fell out when the book flew, but where does it go in the chronology of Dakin Ellis? He can’t be sure. Ellis dated his entries, but he didn’t number the pages. All he can do is guess.
Unless he’s turning research from what it is into what he wants it to be.
Randolph was the best and the worst of my children, and the only one of the lot who is truly mine. The others were born out of Manette’s greed and indifference and my ignorance in the matter of certain things and I love them, even though they’re hard to like, but Randolph was mine and Sylvia’s and God forgive me, he ran away when he was seventeen. Now, I know that Randolph was called to serve and that he went. Clay Woodward saw him at Marigny, so I know he survived, but, beyond that?
He is an Unknown Soldier to us now.
This, Dell thinks, rummaging through the disembodied pages, speed-reading for details. Going forward at a dead run, he sorts them with his eyes fixed on one search entry with few variations: Randolph. Ran. Intent and for the first time sharply focused on proof of existence, he reads until the words blur. He needs evidence.