by Kit Reed
Everything he needs is somewhere inside that house. Deeds, he thinks. Site plans. Notes. Personal letters. The will. The old man would have remembered his secret beloved, the real mother of his bastard son. Given what Dakin writes about Randolph in that journal, given the messes that he, Dell no-last-name, has made, he’s pretty sure Randolph was the old man’s favorite. Even if he wasn’t, Dakin would have made provisions for both of them in a secret will To be opened in the event of my death. Of course there is one. All he has to do is find it. Then he’ll step up with the paperwork and claim what’s rightfully his.
How much longer can these women live, anyway? They’re at least a hundred and twelve. Hang in, dude, and eventually you’ll inherit, no matter how long you have to wait.
At the moment, he’s leafing through the crumbling pages of the few bound volumes of the Metropolitan that are too fragile to scan. He made nice with the librarian and she was thrilled to help a researcher who cares as much as she does. He’s rummaged through index cards and pulled multiple histories of the city out of the stacks but there’s nothing on Dakin’s runaway son except for this one item, which may be all he ever wanted. To look for his likeness in Randolph Ellis’s face.
Now!
The last volume yields a blurred news photo of a birthday party that Mr. and Mrs. Dakin Ellis of 553 May Street threw for one Master Everett Ellis, Five Years Old, in 1901, OK, Randolph would be six. The photographer posed all twenty guests on the top three steps of the big front porch at Tara there, with the stringy birthday boy perched on the top step, the capstone on the pyramid. He’s positioned dead center, scowling in his dapper white linen suit even though they’ve put a cardboard crown on their angry little king. Dell stares into the black-and-white photo until his eyes cross; this newsprint was flaky and yellowed with age for decades before it came into his hands. Another few years and it will vanish, like the past.
The other guests are arranged on the two steps below this Everett, polite courtiers. Dell thinks he knows which ones belong to the late Dakin Ellis Senior, and the late Mrs. Dakin Ellis— they have their father’s anxious squint. They have their mother’s high forehead, the sharp chin, even the littlest ones. Handsome woman in the many, many society photographs in the Metropolitan, but nobody you’d like. And the bastard son of Dakin’s beloved? He leans closer. The photo is grainy, the faces hard to make out.
Wait. Here’s a passionate, dark-haired boy positioned at the far right end of the bottom step, several removes from the king for the day. He looks nothing like the others. The photographer has him halfway out of the frame. Like he doesn’t count. Unlike the others, who fidget and lounge in degrees of protest, this boy is at ease, giving the camera a great big what-the-hell grin.
That one, he decides. That’s him.
He leans in so close that his nose grazes the page, memorizing the face of the child who belongs to him. That he belongs to.
At closing time.
Dell’s tempted to slit the margin and pull this page out of the volume, but only a fool would touch paper this old. It won’t come out in one piece. Besides, who defaces an archival volume? Not him. Oh shit, why do I know about archives. Chill, you don’t. Unless you were one. Stop. Only a fool would jam what’s left of the page into his shirt and walk out with it, not in this rain. He can’t take care of anything even when the sun’s out, not living the way he does. Let the archivist look after it until he comes back with Ivy to confirm the ID. If she knows. He thinks she does. She’s that old.
Fool, you’d need a forklift to move her and her scooter anywhere. And a van. Rethink. Maybe the truth of his ancestor is buried deep in Ivy’s memory, and he can exhume it— with a little help. If not, there’s always the attic. Go home.
Home? He thinks so. There are signs. That confirmation he found in Dakin’s journal. The bastard son. Dell belongs.
He knows it.
All he has to do is complete the proof.
It’s a long way from a guess to documentation, but he’ll find it, he thinks, going along with his head bent against the driving rain. It’s somewhere inside that house. He’ll skin up through the dining room hatch and find it. Given the rain, he may not have to wait until night. Hell, he can even sleep up there, and if it takes days, weeks to get what he needs?
He can wait.
CHAPTER 38
Theo
A bunch of messed-up dreams rolled in on me when I went to bed and they don’t quit. It’s like I’m trapped inside a giant goldfish bowl, bed and all. It won’t matter how fast I run, I can’t get out of the bowl, and the worst part is, some lady is yelling at me, but I don’t know why, no way can it be her, it’s too loud. I made a head sandwich to shut her out but there aren’t enough pillows in the world.
Holy crap, she’s out there, banging on my … Go away, lady, you’re a nighttime thing. Then she yells.
“Theo? I said, Theo!”
“Mom?”
“Theo, get up!”
Holy crap, why do I feel like shit?
“Do you know what time it is?”
How long has she been knocking? I think, Don’t piss me off. I say, “Not really. Look at your phone!”
“Lunchtime!”
“No way!”
Fail. She’s already pissed. “Way. It’s almost noon!”
I take the pillow off my face and yell, “I’m coming, OK?”
It sure as hell doesn’t look like noon. The gray light in my dumb-old-lady’s idea of a ship’s cabin is all wet and corrupted by rain. It’s raining so hard out there that the glass in my porthole is fogged, like we’re in the ocean and the house just submerged.
There’s a different smell coming up from the kitchen too. Like Mom’s been down there making her corned-beef hash and scrambled eggs for me. Like she’s trying to make up for something I don’t know about, but I’m not hungry, I just feel bad.
At lunchtimes Aunt Rosemary usually dishes up PB&J, baloney, that stuff. Today it smells like real food cooking. I woke up feeling like crap. All weird and fletchy, like there’s something I’m supposed do, but I don’t know what it is. Facing lunch with the aunts sucks, but it beats dealing with bad dreams, so I grab my hoodie and bonk-bonk-bonk down the back stairs, in case Mom thought I wasn’t pissed.
It turns out she’s made her corned-beef hash and scrambled eggs for me, along with cocoa and Poppin’ Fresh. Like she’s trying to make up to me for something I don’t know about.
Whatever, I’m not all that hungry anyway.
Brunch or whatever Mom wants to call it goes OK, probably because it’s just her and me at the table with zero aunts on deck, a major plus. Maybe they all went back to bed because of the rain or else they’re stacked in their recliners in front of the dark flatscreen with Aunt Ivy parked on the end, all lined up and waiting for General, at which time Aunt Iris finally turns on the set. It’s like church for them.
So Mom and I are alone in the ark, like, waiting out the flood. I’m not what you would call hungry. I feel bad. I look up and Mom isn’t eating either. She’s pushing it around her plate. Oh shit, is it something I did?
I go, “You’re not eating.”
“Neither are you. Theo, is there a problem?”
“Not that I know of. Ungreat sleeping. Bad dreams.”
She serves up an oh-is-that-all smile and the Hale family punchline for whiners. “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.”
Damn Dad, I mean, damn you Barry, every family has its own language, and you wrote part of ours. You left us with a fucking playbook for every occasion, and this one is W.C. Fields getting stuck in the middle of the blizzard. They’re in this drafty log cabin and he’s putting the family to bed, we saw that DVD a hundred dozen times. I hand Mom the setup line we use to reassure each other. “You open your window a little bit, Ma.”
And Mom snaps off the good old comeback, the way she always does when we’re letting each other know that we’re OK. “Good night, son. You open your window a little bit too.”
The problem is, we’re not OK. It isn’t. We just finished lunch, but it’s fucking dark outside. We’re sitting in other people’s kitchen messing with food we usually like, nothing to say and nothing we want to do. OK, we’re both depressed. Because rain. Because rain, and that’s just part of it. There’s me. Plus, Mom really is acting like she’s guilty, or she’s about to be. Something’s wrong, and she can’t figure out how to tell me what it is.
I go, “Mom?”
It comes out in a terrible rush. “Barry wants us to meet him in Biloxi.”
“Agh.” I piss and sweat over what to say to her. I want to do it, I don’t want to do it, I want everything to go back to the way it was before Barry threw us in the trash but I’m really pissed off at him, I don’t know what Mom wants right now and she looks at me like she knows what I want but there’s nothing we can do about it, at least not today. I want to do it, I don’t want to do it, I don’t know what Mom wants and I go, “Is that so bad?”
Her mouth is zigzagging, like she doesn’t know which face to make. “What do you think?”
She isn’t exactly explaining, so I stick it to her because what went on in my head last night is too hard to explain. “What do you think?”
The zigzag flattens out into a straight line and she comes back all hardball. “I said, what. Do. You. Think?”
“OK, it would suck.” Then this thing that chased me all night catches up and mows me down. “But we’ve got to get the fuck out of this fucking house!”
“I’m working on it!”
“Oh shit, Mom, I’m not trying to guilt you, I just.”
“Theo, what’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing, I’m fine!”
“Don’t. Don’t even try.”
That squint. You can see through me, Mom, but what’s up with you? “OK. Somebody told me something about this house that creeps me out.”
Her head whips around. “Who?”
Shrug. Make that face.
I’m a hard ticket today, starting with the sleeping so late plus not eating her special brunch, and now this. “OK, Theo. What did they say?”
I don’t fucking know! Think fast, dude, switch topics. Now. I’m not about to tell her what I thought this whatever yelled at me, and I sure as hell can’t tell her who I think it was. Worse. If I tell her, she’ll blow me off like she did that day in the parking lot when she went all there-there on me. Can’t let her snap into full-on mom, like I’m freaking out like a little kid. Lie. “It was Dell.”
“That nice guy from Staples?” She brightens up.
“Yeah.”
“That helped me with the box?”
Work it, dude. “That one.”
“What did he say?”
Now it’s my face going eight ways to Sunday. “I don’t know!”
She sighs. Relief, I guess. She’s got that look, like she’s about to go all there-there anyway, which she kind of does. “Don’t worry, T. Whatever you heard, it’s just another story. Old, old houses like this one? Stuff gets around. Sleepy Hollow kind of things, OK?”
Damn if I can tell her it’s OK. I sort-of nod.
“Don’t give it another thought. Think legends. And if you run into what’s-his-name— Dell again, ask him who sold him that one. And tell him Lane says hey.”
Ding! “OK.”
She actually smiles. Like that settled anything. At least she’s happy. “Well, back to the drawing board.”
I say what you say when your mom is going back upstairs to go on not getting a job. “Go forth and knock ’em dead.”
But she smiled. It was about Dell, I think, and in spite of him throwing his knife at me, I think in some weird way he could be our last hope. Like, he doesn’t have a car, at least not one that I know of, but Mom does. She and I could run away tonight, we could sleep in the car, but we have zero money to get any further than the Publix up the way. What I don’t know is, does Dell?
Maybe he has money stashed somewhere that kid Dopey was too scared to look or too dumb to know. What if he really did break into Dell’s place that one time, and he really stole this magazine off his chest while he was asleep? Either it’s a lie or Dell was faking because he was not about to get stupid and bring the cops down on him because he flashed the knife. Woah. Dell owes me one.
Look, he rose up and attacked me just for coming in! I told no one, so he owes me, right?
He probably does have money somewhere, right?
It’s raining buckets, right?
It’s gotta be damp as fuck down there, and if I go back into Dell’s hideout with Rosemary’s umbrella and some— right, leftover hash— on a paper plate covered in foil, he might even be OK with me coming back to visit after all. And if the back porch is leaking the way I think it is, he’ll at least thank me for the umbrella, right?
Look, Dell’s gotta be as sick of this place as me. If I say so and he says so, maybe we can talk. I’ll tell him what I think, and if he has money and we have the car, maybe we can get the hell out of here. He’s strong, I’m smart, all we have to do is break it to Mom. Then we can load up the car and bail on this nightmare scene before the rain lets up, and if Dell is, like, hard to convince?
All I have to do is give him that weird message the two guys in the totally Men in Black outfits fobbed off on me, so, cool! Whatever he thinks I did to him the other day, he’ll have to forgive me, right?
By the time I think this through and go back to the cabin— er, bedroom— on the landing for a couple of things, good old General has started up, so I’m good to go out through the kitchen and down the back steps and into his squat, hideout, whatever; it’s cool, and being as I’m in high planning mode right now and it’s a terrific plan, for the first time since I woke up freaking, I’m cool.
The problem being that wherever he is right now, in spite of the raining-buckets part, Dell is nowhere around. At least it isn’t raining inside, although whatever I’m walking on under here squelches at every step so whatever I think I’m doing, it won’t be sneaking up.
No problem. His stuff is still here all right, no water leaking in overhead, it’s still dry except for the part where the cement apron drops off, which is totally turning to squelch. The old wood room or whatever where Dell sleeps is perfectly dry except around the edges, but I went in up to my ankles just getting around the partition.
Shit. He’s not here. My only friend in this crap universe is totally gone. Like, who in his right mind would want to go out in stuff like this without rain gear? Oright. Garbage bags. Everybody in their right mind uses garbage bags. So, what? Look for the money?
Bad idea.
Sit here and wait?
Nope. They’ll be hunting me. Mom would freak if she found out that her Mr. Nice Guy lives underneath this fucking house. If Dell came in and found me sitting here, he’d freak. OK, stupid. Leave a note. Then he has time to think about it and get back to me before I show up and he flips the knife. Fine. Done deal.
All I have to do is go into the crap on his not-exactly desk and find something I can write on. Done. Blank inside of the laptop carton. Sharpie. I print large, so there’s no mistaking it:
URGENT ISSUES
1. WE HAVE TO GO
2. WE NEED TO TALK
3. PING ME. SOMEHOW
I hope to hell he gets back to me. Somehow. I lean it on a book dead centered on his sleeping bag, so he’ll see it first thing. Then I rethink and add the last item, which either is or is not a good thing.
4. THE GUYS HUNTING YOU LEFT A MESSAGE. THEY SAID TELL HIM THAT HIS FATHER FORGIVES HIM.
WHATEVER.
T.
CHAPTER 39
EXTRACT
Dakin Ellis
Undated—
Dearest,
If only I knew where and how to send this letter to you I would hand carry it to your front door wherever you are. I would fall on my knees and beg you to let me in. If only, if only. Dreadful, not knowing anything and for so long, but after we embrace
d and completed the transaction, you vanished and I still don’t know why or how. I wanted Manette to plummet to her death so I could marry you. Entrapped or miraculously single, I will always want to marry you.
Sylvia Elliott Marden, I miss you every day of my life, and I grieve for what I did to yours. You deserved so much more, and with a much, much better man than I. I never should have stopped to help you on that first day of our secret life. I should have let my rage drive me on along the river walk until it was spent, past the city limits and all the way to Mayport and beyond. But I saw you striding along the riverbank with your hair down and you were alone, so angry and so wild that whatever the cause, your mood matched mine. Yes, I fell in step with you. I was in a rage with no other means of expressing itself and so without speaking, we walked on and on.
It was another one of those days when my wife drove me out of the house. Diminutive, demanding Little Manette.
I endured years of deep discussion of Manette’s lust for the next pretty thing. Recitals of my flaws. Oh, Sylvie, lover, my dearest, my wife was intent on perfecting me, even as she lavished thousands upon thousands of dollars on the parade of objects she brought into this loathsome, insatiable house. She must have this particular tapestry to complete the picture. That urn. The perfect gilded triangular chair.
Every few days she needed another precious This to complete her life, then a That and another That and another and another, until her costly, unending Thats crowded me out of her boudoir and out of her bed, which they did except at certain utilitarian times. Eight or nine more, I suppose. You see, the goddess of acquisition had decided that her next essential That would be our second child. It seems Dakin Junior was too stolid. She wanted a girl. Manette was very specific in this case. She wanted a pretty daughter that she could fuss over and dress up in pretty things from Charleston and New York and even Paris to complete the scene. Another child, I thought. It’s certainly time. She can dedicate herself to motherhood instead of her insatiable need for more things. That’s all they were. Things.