“And?”
“And when Jim finds someone to fuck, he’ll spend the next day sound asleep.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t sound so disappointed. I can call Jim’s cell and wake him up if you want.”
“No.”
“You sure?”
I nod.
I’m jealous, not disappointed. Jealous that the two of them spent the night together when Nate and I didn’t.
“It’s fine. Let him sleep.” I raise my umbrella, looking ahead.
Keeping an eye on Ollie roaming the somber landscape is a challenge. A glut of earth tones masks him from sight. His wagging tail is the only blip on the terrain that gives away his whereabouts.
“Does Jim do that a lot?” I ask, starting down the hill toward the cabin.
“Fuck, or sleep?” Nate jokes.
“Fuck,” I say, my voice direct.
“More than me.” He takes the umbrella from my hand and holds it over us, his other hand on my back. His hair is drippy, ends curling over his ears.
“Meaning?”
“More than me.”
“Thought you wanted to talk?”
“Not about Jim’s sex life.”
“Okay, agreed. Tell me how you guys met.”
“He’s my cousin.”
“Really?” I move closer to his side, fingering the cord to Eli’s key on my neck to make sure the knot is still tight.
“Yep.”
“You don’t look alike.”
“Do we have to?”
“I guess not. Doubt I look like my cousins.”
He smiles and slips his hand under my hoodie, rubbing my back. “My aunt had Jim a couple of months after I was born. We grew up together, best friends in Vinland Falls. But he’s going through a rough patch right now.”
“What happened?”
“Lost his job, his woman, and his dog.”
“Ouch.”
“I know. I’ve been trying to help him out, at least on the job front. I’m worried that his tat addiction and obsession with buying crap online will put him in debt. I never met a man who likes to spend money as much as Jim.”
“What did he do?”
“He was a mechanic.”
“I meant to lose his job.”
We stop a few feet from the cabin. Nate surveys a dead oak tree and a large branch that has punctured the roof. There’s a sizable hole in the door, the windows are broken, and the front steps are uneven.
“He got in an argument and pushed a guy to give him a scare. But the guy fell into an open tool chest. Now Jim’s having a hard time finding another garage that will take him in. Word spreads fast in Vinland Falls, probably like it does here.”
“So he’s not a private detective.”
“A tagalong for now. Good at paperwork and making calls. I give him the boring jobs that I hate.”
“But you’re one, right?”
“Yep, certified and licensed. I went to school for police science. Then shadowed a guy for a year before I set off on my own.”
“You like it?”
“Love it. But not legal or financial work, I only take on personal cases, like tracking down long-lost family members and chasing husbands.”
I look up at him. “Only husbands, not wives?”
“It’s mostly women who think their husbands are cheating, not the other way around.”
“Guess men just don’t care.”
“Or they’re oblivious. Women pay more attention to things than men do.” He sets his lips firm, winning brownie points with me.
“Huh, I could’ve used you a few years back,” I say, not going into details. Even when he casts a sideways glance, my lips stay sealed about my ex-husband and his bimbo.
“What the hell am I gonna do with this place?” Nate asks.
I take a hard look at Grady’s cabin. It’s simple, boxy, something that a child might draw: front door square in the middle with a window on each side, stone chimney, an addition on the back that could’ve been a bedroom. The primitive home seems small for Grady, his wife, and their adopted daughter. Then again, the private quarters at the lodge are no bigger, and five of us lived there.
“We going in?” I ask.
“In a sec.”
A sec is good, but minutes would be better since my feet won’t move. Yesterday I was the daring woman, put my hand on the windowsill and peered inside, got close enough to get a whiff of the wet wood. Then. Eli’s nightmare. Judging from the fact that my nail-biting habit is rearing its ugly head in front of Nate, the dream hit a raw nerve. And even if it makes me look mousy, I can’t stop biting.
The fight to suppress Candy-ass Salem has been an ongoing battle. I’m the girl who was kept submissive by her husband, who was a victim of verbal abuse and easily deceived, who felt like a failure for becoming another twenty-something divorcee. A statistic. Like Connor said, “I let you win because you’re a girl.” Girl meant I was handicapped. Girl meant my husband was in charge. Girl is a conditioning word in a small town to be a shrinking violet, a cycle hard to break. So I continuously debate, weak or tough? Then wonder if a girl has to be one or the other. Can’t she be both, depending on the situation? And why can’t she just BE without having to worry about it? My daily struggle, maybe something I’ll figure out by the time I’m thirty … or forty.
“Nate, let’s go in.” Confident Salem crops up.
“Stay here.” He passes the umbrella, a hand up to keep back. But I don’t. I follow right on his heels.
He stops short of the porch, hesitant.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Listening.”
I wait. Twist my lips. Lift a leg to scratch the back of my calf with my boot. “I don’t hear anything.”
“Good.”
“This is what you did last night? Stood out here and listened?”
“Shh.” Nate’s face is drawn in, an ashen color.
“Are you afraid?” I whisper.
“Yes.” He climbs the steps, black work boots thick with mud.
“Why?” I chase after him.
“Forget it. Not important.”
“Of course it is.”
“It’s foolish.”
“Try me.”
I figure he’s about to shut me down, tell me to drop it. Instead, he cups my chin firm and waits for our eyes to meet.
“Salem, I’m afraid of the past, not the present. Dumb, right?”
“No, I was just thinking the same thing.”
He offers a half-grin. “Ever been inside?”
“No.” I turn to the cabin.
A hint of mold and the faint tang of skunk linger from under the porch. The wooden door shows years of damage with dimples and scratches, waterlines along the bottom, and a softball-sized hole next to the handle. It’s unlocked and open a crack.
My thought of the lodge resembling a haunted house is way off. This is more like it.
Nate puts his hand on the door and gets ready to push it open. “Salem …” My name breaks apart.
“What?”
“The bones …”
“What bones?”
“If you see bones … they’re not Eli’s.”
• • •
“Animal bones. They were Grady’s fetish,” Nate says, opening closet doors, kitchen cabinets, sliding out drawers. “He’d remove the flesh in front of me at the strangest times, like when I was eating dinner or in the tub.”
“In the tub?” I smile with unease. “He was in there with you?”
“In the room. Someone always watched me when I took a bath. And when it was his turn to babysit, he’d bring the bones, sit on the toilet, and clean ’em.”
“That’s fucked up. How old were you?”
“Young. From the time I was born until I was about six, seven maybe. And he cleaned them for years after that. I hated it.”
“I bet.”
“It was easier to watch when I ate. But seeing him remove the flesh when I was naked, it was like I could feel it, feel my flesh tugging off. Something to do with the way he looked at me, studying my face for way too long.” Nate spreads his thumb and forefinger across his jawline and fingers his bones. “He’d look in the mirror at his deformity, then down at me. Sometimes I’d turn my back and pretend he wasn’t there. He’d say, ‘Boy, turn around and be a man. Look at your granddaddy.’ ”
As much as I want to comfort him, I hold still for now, hanging on his words.
“He’d put the bones in a pot of water and leave it in the living room, near where I slept.” He points to the corner of the room. “The cabin had a stench after a few days that made my eyes water. Maybe it’s why my grams got ill.” His voice comes out pained. He’s upfront about all this, an openness I haven’t found outside my family and Joss.
“Then what?” I whisper.
“He’d dump the water outside in the garden and fill the pot up again, over and over until the water stopped getting rank. After that, he’d scrub the bones in the sink, then soak them in hydrogen peroxide to make them white.”
I make a noise in the back of my throat. He meets it with a cold blink, waiting to see if I’m going to speak before he continues.
“After drying them outside for a few days, he’d spread them out on the porch on a leather cloth.”
“Like a ritual?”
He nods. “My mom said they were for healing.”
“For your grandma?”
“No, for him. I’m pretty sure for his face.”
“Oh … that’s sad.”
He walks a circle in the middle of the room, kicking empty beer cans. “I don’t see any now. All his stuff is gone. Looks like people are using the cabin as a party house.”
“High school kids.” With the cans, condom wrappers, cigarette butts, and smashed windows, I’m surprised the kids haven’t burned the cabin down for fun. “Have any good memories of him?”
“No.”
“That was quick. Don’t you even want to think about it?”
I know Grady was cruel. I can hear the twinge in Nate’s voice when he says his name, heard it when he mentioned he hit him with a belt. It’s obvious Grady’s tunneling into him, working his way under his skin now that we’re here.
“I never gave him a ‘World’s Best Granddad’ shirt, if that’s what you mean. He was a lonely, distant drunk. I told myself I wasn’t going to be like him. Guess that’s not working out so well.”
“You’re not like him.”
“In a way I am. He drank at night, said it helped him sleep.”
“Yeah, but … did he hit your mom or grandma?”
“No, not women. I think just me because I didn’t listen.”
“You were just a little boy.”
“I was a bratty kid. And I understand why he did it.”
“Don’t make excuses for him.”
He shrugs, staring straight ahead at the living room wall. “If you got spit at, called a monster, had dog shit thrown at you, wouldn’t you be livid? I know it’s why he drank. And I know when he saw me, a boy with a normal face, he wanted to hurt me.”
His words choke me. A boy with a normal face, he wanted to hurt me.
“And what about Eli?” I whisper.
“Grady wouldn’t kill a kid.”
“Why not? He killed animals. He hit you.”
“A lot of people are hunters and smack their kids around, that doesn’t make them murderers.” He steps closer to the wall, his hand chest-high on one of the logs. “I came back to prove it so I can sleep again.”
“That’s what I thought. What you say and think are two different things.”
He holds up a finger, quieting me the way Connor always did when he read. My dad did the same. He’d stand at the edge of the forest at nightfall, his eyes closed, ears pinned back, hushing us so he could listen. That’s Nate right now. He’s like a Whitfield.
“I’d sleep on the couch each night, but this wall kept me awake. It used to whisper.” My silent feet come up behind him. “It spoke every night. A bunch of incoherent nonsense from a drunken old man.”
“Grady was out here with you during the night?”
“No.”
“Then where?”
“In here.” He taps the wall.
I put my hand next to his. The cold wood is pitted like it was struck several times with a hammer. He follows the length of the log with his fingertips, moving across mine, stepping behind me to get past. I duck to let him through, my fingers tracking his from living room, to kitchen, to hall, where he stops and stares at the bedroom.
“Nate, he was there. Not in the wall, but back in the bedroom. That’s what you heard. I bet he was talking to your grandma.”
“No, he was closer.”
“Noises are amplified when the rest of the world is asleep.”
“I’m not crazy, Salem.”
“I didn’t say—”
He heads to the bedroom with his fingertips still on the wall like a kid running a stick along a fence. He stops in front of the bedroom closet, the bi-fold doors leaning inward and off their tracks. I help move them out of the way, and behind, a sheet of black mold covers the interior drywall of the closet.
Nate feels the back wall. He points out a dark line of mold in a distinct outline of a door. He sets his palms against the wall and pushes inward. My heart holds its beats in expectation. I hear a click, and a section lowers an inch. He tries to slide the section to the left, then right, with no luck.
I feel the top of the door. There’s a bolt in the middle, attached to the ceiling.
“It doesn’t slide. It spins,” I say, forcing one side until it shifts a little. The bottom gets jammed on the sloping floor where the foundation has settled. He helps me push it, the door scraping floorboards as it revolves. I take a step back, waving a cloud of dust and the stench of dead animal away. “Nasty.” I cough.
“Yep.” He puts his shirt sleeve over his nose and mouth. We use our phone screens to light the space. There’s just enough room inside for two people to stand. “This must be his safe,” Nate says. “There’re notches added to the wall for his shotguns.”
“And vile filth I wouldn’t want anyone to come across.” I flip through a musty stack of decades-old porno mags and pick up a few ancient VHS tapes. Riding Rita, Patty Down Under, Stacy’s Big Surprise, setting them down as quickly as I picked them up. “These are awful, Nate.”
He shines his cell onto the pile. “I don’t know about that. Patty Down Under might have a decent plot.” He laughs.
“Riiight. I’m sure it’s full of hot action, complete with a killer soundtrack. Bow-chicka-bow.”
He laughs harder, moving the light up and down each wall. “You shouldn’t be touching those if you don’t know where … they’ve…” His voice drags, eyes set hard above the door.
Looking up, I see a tissue box on a ceiling joist. I stand on my tiptoes to reach for it, but Nate grabs my hand.
“Let me. Might be bones,” he whispers.
I study his expression to see if he’s worried. He stands tall before me with watery eyes and a twitchy nose from the pungent odors in the tiny space.
“But not bones of a boy,” I whisper back, clutching Eli’s key.
He exhales a long breath, resting his hand on my shoulder. “Go check on Ollie. I’ll make sure it’s not more of Grady’s porn collection, or lube, or any trash like that.”
I shake my head, not about to walk away from my brother.
“It’s not him, Salem. The box is too small.”
“Then I’ll stay.”
twelve
I slump against the living room wall in my private quarters, the tissue box tight against my chest. When I was a kid, I wasn’t aware of much happening within the family other than the event with Eli. Broken bones, arguments, lack of money, or a missing cat. These significa
nt events to some kids were meaningless to me. Nothing outweighed that one experience. Is it any wonder why I never knew my granddad was close to Grady Murphy? At least, close enough to exchange an ample amount of letters, enough to fill a tissue box.
And now the only written words I have of my granddad, besides a few birthday and holiday cards, are these letters. Everything else was lost in the fire.
A timid knock, I swing my head to the door, knowing it’s Nate. Hard to believe he and Jim are pitching in, vacuuming and doing a mound of laundry, while I’m standing here in a daze. For the first time in years I’m suffering from Sparrow Lodge fatigue, still needing to bathe Ollie, make the beds, order more packages of coffee and tea. I wish it could all wait. I want to take a breather to read these letters, and not while I’m working this evening. I need a block of time without any interruptions. Time to myself. Time to cry, if necessary. But it seems improbable tonight with the daylight sky turning purple and four o’clock approaching.
A second knock, louder this time. “Salem?”
Ollie prances to the door, leaving a trail of dried mud balls on the floor. His tail wags, one paw up on the wood as a greeting to his new pal on the other side. I should let Nate in. I’m acting selfish, insisting I get to read the letters first.
“Yeah?” I say, cemented to the wall.
“Open the door so we can talk.”
“Ollie needs a bath. I’m running out of time.”
“Just open it for a sec. I wanna ask you something.”
He wants the letters. We discussed this walking back to the lodge. They’re his property, found at his place, sent to his granddad. However, my granddad wrote them. They came from my family. These letters will remain snug to my chest forever, just like the logo I wear over my heart each day. They’re that special.
“What if there’s a dark family secret I don’t want anyone to know about?” I ask, walking toward the door.
“Like what? You think Grady and your granddad were lovers?” Nate shushes Jim when he laughs at the comment. “That’s not what’s on my mind, beautiful. I wanna ask you a question. Face to face.”
Ollie steps back to give me his spot. I lay my hand on the door, Nate’s energy surging through it.
The Release of Secrets_Littlest Sparrow Gone Page 9