by J. S. Volpe
“So how are you?” she said as he shut the door.
“I don’t know. Overwhelmed, I guess.”
She nodded. “I can relate.”
He motioned at the parlor door. “Do you want to sit down or—”
“Actually, I was thinking you could show me around your new digs while we talk.” She shook her head. “It’s weird to think you’re my neighbor now.”
“I’m not, really. Not yet. Technically the house isn’t mine yet. Or, well, it is, but it isn’t.”
“Is that one of the things that’s conditional on your completing college?”
“Yeah. I’m not entirely clear on all the details, but I think it’s like, the house is gonna be held for me by some kind of legal entity. But I’m still technically the owner, and I’m responsible for its day-to-day upkeep.”
“Maybe so no one else would handle the Collection.”
“Probably. In any case, it’ll be a long time before I can actually move in here.”
“Still.” She looked down the hallway toward the center circle. “Have you gotten a chance to look around yet?”
He nodded at the bucket. “Only while I was looking for that stuff. There’s a big, fancy dining room and a huge kitchen back there.”
“Well, let’s check the place out. We can talk about things as we go, maybe discuss our next move.”
First he showed her the rooms he had already seen. The library proved a huge disappointment to Calvin. Instead of the obscure tomes on magic and anomalous phenomena he had been expecting, the selection consisted of the usual classics of literature and various nonfiction subjects. Then Calvin remembered that Mr. May had mentioned a library upstairs where he kept Turner May’s journal. That must be where all the cool stuff was, the stuff Mr. May didn’t want the casual visitor to see.
After Calvin showed Cynthia the kitchen and the dining room (she whistled in awe at both of them), they headed down the west wing. On the north side was a music room with periwinkle-colored wallpaper, a piano and a harp draped in white cloths, lots of plush chairs and couches, and a fireplace that looked big enough to fit a car inside. Across the hall was a game room that was decorated in dark reds and greens and contained a pool table, a large round table ringed with eight chairs, two smaller chess tables, and another huge fireplace.
As they headed for the east wing, Calvin said, “Did Stephen Krezchek say how long you guys have been named in Mr. May’s will?”
“No, why?”
“Apparently I was added to it several years ago.”
“But how? You only just met Mr. May last week!”
“Don’t ask me. But he must have known me somehow. He wouldn’t leave his life’s work to a total stranger.”
“Do you think maybe, um…” Cynthia gave him a hesitant look. “I mean, I don’t want to cast aspersions or anything, but could Mr. May have been, you know, related to you? I don’t know a lot about your family, but maybe he got all cozy with your grandma when they were young, and, you know…”
“I thought of that, too. And I guess it’s theoretically possible. But honestly, I just don’t see it. I look too much like my parents, and my parents look too much like their parents. Seriously, if you saw pictures of everyone, you’d know exactly what I mean.”
“Maybe your great-grandma, then. Mr. May was old enough.”
“I guess. But that still doesn’t explain why he left stuff to you guys.”
“Yeah, but with my family it makes more sense because we were neighbors, and our families had a tangled history together. But you—you’re sort of…” She shrugged. “No offense, but you’re kind of the odd man out here.”
“Yeah. Story of my life.”
They took only a quick look at the room on the north side of the east wing since they had already seen it through the window five days ago. The room across the hall was done in rich browns and tans and contained leather-upholstered chairs, Tiffany lamps, paintings of hunting scenes, another huge fireplace, and lots of dust.
“I don’t even know what the hell some of these rooms are,” Calvin said. “I mean, what do you call this? A smoking room? A study?”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s yours now, so it can be whatever you want it to be. You can make it a study, or a meditation room, or you can tear it up and convert it into a bowling alley.”
“A bowling alley?”
“Just an example. The point is, it’s up to you. The possibilities are endless.”
They left the whatever-it-was room and headed to the spiral staircase.
“Basement first?” Calvin asked.
“Sure.”
They went down and found themselves in a small, square, concrete-floored room with a door in each wall. One door led to a wine cellar filled with cobweb-shrouded wine racks, all empty. A faint stink of vinegar lingered in the room. The next door led to a room that contained the furnace, the water heater, and a small stack of firewood.
Calvin grunted. “I don’t think there’s much down here.”
The last two rooms proved him wrong. Both of them were crammed with a bewildering variety of items, apparently things that Mr. May hadn’t known what to do with but wasn’t comfortable getting rid of. There were stacks of yellowed tax forms dating back to the 1960s, bags full of books, boxes of china, old furniture, antique metal contraptions that neither Calvin nor Cynthia could identify, and various oddities, such as a stuffed and mounted crocodile and a barrel full of salt.
“You’re gonna have a hell of a time sorting through all this stuff,” Cynthia said.
“You could help.”
“Oh, no. This is all yours. Your silver lining, your cloud.”
As they explored the maze of items, Calvin noticed a box of small glass vials with black plastic screw tops.
“Vials!” he said. He grabbed the box and rummaged through it. His excitement died when he discovered that all the vials were empty, and there was nothing else in the box except a receipt from the North Coast Medical Supply Company dated 1974.
“Crap,” he said.
“What are you looking for?” Cynthia asked.
“Remember the stuff I told you Mr. May was saying right before he died—‘Emily’ and ‘painting’ and ‘vile’ and all that? What if he wasn’t saying ‘vile’ as in ‘reprehensible’? What if he meant ‘vial,’ like one of these?”
“Calvin, are you sure you’re not reading too much into all that? I mean, he might have just been delirious.”
“Maybe. But remember, one of the last things he said was ‘yours now.’ I didn’t know what that meant then. It sounded like more gibberish. But now it’s obvious what he was trying to tell me. Which makes me wonder about everything else he said.”
“Even so, if it was something important why didn’t he tell you before?”
“Maybe it was something he just found out about. Or, I don’t know, maybe he simply didn’t want to tell me for some reason. I get the impression he played a lot of things really close to the vest, that he knew a lot more about stuff than he let on. In fact I keep wondering if he knew he was going to die.”
“What do you mean?”
He told her about the odd comment that had enabled Calvin to find the key to the front door, and about Krezchek’s revelation that Mr. May had made an amendment to his trust only a couple of hours before his death.
“That’s right!” Cynthia said. “Krezchek was over here when I talked to Mr. May on the phone yesterday. I forgot about that.” She shrugged. “But it might not mean anything. Maybe he did know he was about to die. Sometimes people can just tell. Physically.”
“I suppose.”
“What, you think it was more than that? You think he was, like, psychic or something?”
“It’s a possibility. I mean, it seems like practically everybody who lives around here winds up having visions of some kind sooner or later. Maybe he foresaw his own death or something.”
She wrinkled her nose. “God, I hope not. That would be really disturbing.”
They returned to the stairs and headed up to the second floor. They had already seen the two Collection rooms in the north wing and the one Collection room in the east wing. But there were two more rooms in the east wing that May hadn’t shown them. One of these was another bathroom. The other was a darkroom that didn’t look like it had been used in years.
They moved on to the south wing. Once again, two doors faced each other across the corridor. The one on the right led to the library that Calvin had been hoping to find. It was larger than the one on the first floor and nearly half the books were devoted to magic, demonology, parapsychology, cryptozoology, UFOs, and other anomalous phenomena. There were also sections on nearly every other subject under the sun.
“Some of these are really old,” Cynthia said. She pulled a book from the shelf. It was sealed in an acid-free plastic bag, which was the only thing keeping the book in the shape of a book. The tome’s spine had crumbled into fragments, the pages were loose, and swaths of the leather binding were flaking off. The gilt lettering on the front cover was almost completely worn away, forcing Cynthia to tilt the cover to the light to read the impressions of the letters.
“Aenigma Mundi,” she read.
Calvin glanced up from the first edition copy of Charles Fort’s Book of the Damned he was flipping through. “Never heard of it,” he said.
He set the book back on the shelf and looked around the room. “You know, Turner May’s journal is in here somewhere, too.”
“But where?”
“I don’t know. Is there a local history section?”
His gaze settled on an oil painting on the wall nearby. He had been so awed by the books that he hadn’t really paid much attention to anything else in the room. But at the sight of the painting he forgot all about the books. He strode over to it.
The painting’s photorealistic style told him even before he saw the signature that it was another Randolph Crow painting. It showed a beautiful young woman with long chestnut hair and green eyes sitting on the ground between the gnarled roots of a tree, her back against the thick dark trunk. She wore a filmy white toga that exposed one shoulder and breast. In the grass around her bare feet danced a group of fairies, each about five inches tall, with willowy limbs, long hair, and shimmering butterfly-like wings. The woman was smiling up at and extending one hand toward another fairy that was hovering over her head. All of the fairies were naked and female (presumably; they had smooth hairless skin where their genitals should be, and only the smallest of breasts), and each one’s hair was a different color: black, red, blonde, white, brown, and various shades in between.
“Hey,” he said. “Here’s another painting by your, um…what was he again? Your great-uncle or something?”
“I think so, yeah.” She headed over and joined him in front of the painting.
“This must be one of the two paintings of Anna May that Mr. May mentioned.”
“It’s well done,” she said with a crisp nod. “He was talented.”
“Yeah. And Anna May was…” He was about to say “smokin’ hot” but he doubted a comment like that would go over well with Cynthia. “She was beautiful.”
“Uh-huh,” she said.
He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. She seemed uncomfortable, antsy. Her eyes wouldn’t settle on one spot of the painting for long, and she kept shifting her weight from one foot to the other. It was as if she didn’t want to have to look at the painting anymore but was afraid it would look weird or rude to turn away from it too quickly.
Calvin wondered what was wrong. Was she embarrassed by Anna May’s bare breast? It didn’t seem likely; Cynthia didn’t strike him as the prudish sort. What, then?
Then a thought struck him. Maybe it was the fairies. Maybe they reminded her of Emily. That had to be it.
“Come on,” he said. “We’d better hurry up and finish the tour so we can work out our next move.”
She looked relieved and a little surprised.
“Yeah, that’s—that sounds good. Let’s go.”
Across the hall was the master bedroom. It contained a wooden four-poster bed, a rocking chair, a dresser, an old wooden trunk shut with a padlock, a glass-doored cabinet full of books and sundry knickknacks, and another of the house’s omnipresent fireplaces.
The second Anna May painting hung on the wall directly opposite the door. In this one she lay on her side on a grassy riverbank with one bare foot dangling in the water. Her face was turned to the viewer, but her eyes had a faraway look as if she saw only some pleasant inner dream. She wore a diaphanous white gown and apparently nothing else; her nipples, dark and round, were visible through the fabric, though her artfully arranged legs hid her genitals. Behind her, huge dark trees loomed like a sinister fairy-tale forest.
Calvin wished he could spend a while examining the painting, but he didn’t want to linger here long. Not only did he want to finish up the tour of the house for Cynthia’s (and Emily’s) sake, but he felt uncomfortable being in Mr. May’s bedroom. Though the old man was dead, Calvin couldn’t help feeling that they were violating his privacy.
He took a quick look around and was about to head out the door when Cynthia said, “I wonder who this is.”
“Huh?” He turned. She was examining a framed photograph on Mr. May’s bedside table.
He went over for a better look. It was a black-and-white portrait of a pretty young woman with soft, full lips, wire-rimmed spectacles, and dark hair pulled back in a bun. Judging by the woman’s appearance and the quality of the photo itself, Calvin guessed the picture dated from the 1930s.
“The love of his life, maybe?” Calvin said. He couldn’t help glancing at Cynthia as he said it, wondering if she would catch any deeper, personal meaning in his words.
She didn’t respond at all. She just hunched down to look at the photo more closely.
“It’s so old,” she said. “I mean, why is the picture so old? Why does he have only this one ancient picture of whoever it was? I wonder if something happened to her.”
“I don’t know,” Calvin said. He stared at the photo and imagined Mr. May gazing at it sadly before climbing into bed alone every night. Maybe he even talked to it. To her. Calvin suddenly wanted to be in here less than ever. “Let’s check out the west wing. That’s all that’s left at this point.”
There were two rooms in the west wing. One was a spare bedroom that obviously hadn’t been used in ages. Every surface was thick with dust.
The other room, however, was one of the most-used rooms in the house.
It was an office. A black walnut desk faced the door. Atop it a computer sat amid a jumble of papers, pens, folders, and sundry office supplies. A satellite map of the block of land that contained the woods and the May and Crow houses was tacked to a large bulletin board on the wall behind the desk. A black push-pin marked the clearing where Emily had been abducted. Along the other walls were half a dozen metal file cabinets, bookshelves laden with bulky reference books, a fax machine, and a framed poster for a 50s movie called The Terrible Dr. Eris. The poster showed a huge, shadowy grinning face and a giant pair of hands, their fingers hooked into claws, looming in the darkness above a square-jawed man and a busty blonde.
“Huh,” Cynthia said, stepping forward to examine the computer. “I never really had Mr. May pegged as the computer-age sort. I kind of pictured him tapping away on an antique typewriter or something.”
“I never had him pegged as a big movie lover, either.” Calvin said. He peered at the credits at the bottom of the poster, wondering if Mr. May had been involved in its production in some way. But Calvin didn’t see a single name he recognized. Not even any of the actors. Was the movie simply a favorite of Mr. May’s, then? Calvin realized he would probably never know. The idea depressed him.
He joined Cynthia beside the desk and scanned the clutter atop it: a coffee ring–stained printout about Easter Island, a bent paperclip, a scratchpad covered with sloppily scribbled numbers, a spray of pencil shavings in fro
nt of the electric pencil sharpener. These tiny reminders of a life now gone only depressed him even more. He imagined Mr. May sitting here in the dead of night, the old man’s face bathed in the glow of the computer monitor as he pursued the latest anomaly.
This was it, Calvin realized. The final form of Mr. May’s time upon the Earth. It had stopped forever in this messy and unfinished state. Had Mr. May hoped for one last, old-age meeting with the girl in the photo in his bedroom? Had he wanted to see The Terrible Dr. Eris one more time? Were there anomaly files half-finished amid the heaps of papers on the desk? Well, now they would never be finished, at least as far as Mr. May was concerned. All undone things would stay undone forever, all unanswered questions would remain unanswered, all loose threads would dangle eternally.
His thoughts were too much for him. His chest tightened. Tears filled his eyes. A choked sob escaped his throat.
Cynthia, who had been inspecting a pewter kangaroo paperweight, looked up at him in surprise.
“Calvin, what’s wrong?”
Embarrassed, he turned away from her and tried to wipe his tears away with the heels of his palms. She came around beside him and laid a consoling hand on his back.
“What is it?” she said.
“I don’t know. It’s just…all his stuff…” He shrugged. He must sound like such an idiot, blubbering away over a bunch of paperclips and coffee stains.
“It’s okay,” she said gently. “I understand.” Her hand began to stroke his back.
He nodded. But he suddenly found himself unable to focus on anything except that hand moving slowly up and down his back. Only the thin fabric of his shirt separated his skin from hers. Her face was barely six inches away, close enough to reveal a faint spray of freckles on the bridge of her nose that he had never noticed before. Close enough that he could see his own reflection in her eyes. Close enough to kiss.
His thoughts whirled in confusion. Was this a bad time to make a move? He wasn’t sure. Tragedy often brought people together, didn’t it? It happened in the movies, at least. Besides, would she have gotten this close to him if she didn’t at least feel comfortable around him? Would she spend all this time alone with him?
He thought again of the forever-unfinished state of Mr. May’s life. Of that mysterious girl on his bedside table—a lost love, a never-begun love, whatever. Of loose ends and desires unfulfilled.