No one had noticed Jenks yet. He glanced around the nearly empty room. The house had gone through some changes in recent years but nothing too extreme. At some point the family had broken out a section of the far wall and put in a glass atrium. Jenks imagined they'd kept ferns and potted palms, maybe some Easter lilies in there surrounding a wicker breakfast set. It was the kind of room Jenks' mother would've liked two decades ago, back when his family had been living here.
1529 Baldwin Boulevard. Even seeing the numbers on the mailbox made his heart rate pick up. The 'For Sale' sign planted on the lawn had tilted in the heavy wind, and the dead leaves swept over the front yard and piled into calf-high drifts. The neighborhood had been going to shit over the last few years but you just didn't notice it that much in the autumn.
He stepped farther into the living room. Nobody looked up.
They asked Tracy to play the tape for them once more. She didn't appear to want to. She wasn't nervous or even greatly annoyed, just detached, the way most teenagers seem to feel about everything.
Tracy Mallory had a round face framed by coiling lengths of blonde corkscrew curls. Little fresh girl pout with full peach lips. She had some meat to her, spread out in the right places, and she dressed to jiggle and bounce in a tight lace blouse, no bra, patched bell-bottom jeans. Boys would already be going berserk over her, wrestling each other in the halls for her attention. In three years she'd be voluptuous. In twenty, after a couple of kids, she'd be bloated and eyeing liposuction ads, busting the hump of her insurance agent to cover it as a health necessity.
When Tracy refused to play the recording again her mother took it from her lap, fumbled with the buttons, popped the tape, stuck it back in, rewound but not far enough.
He heard his sister's voice clearly. She sounded excited, anxious, with a hint of hostility. "What's that? Give it to me!"
He'd heard those exact words perhaps a hundred times since he was eight.
The story was getting older every day. Whenever someone else took over the house and wound up getting something on tape, the voices always said the same damn thing. Jenks was a bit surprised that anybody still cared. Maybe it was the season. Next October would be the twenty-year anniversary, and he'd heard that a documentary for some Halloween special on the History Channel was in the works.
He'd been eight years old when his sister had been raped and beaten to death, dragged through the house and left in the yard while his parents attended his second grade chorus recital. Her boyfriend, a grease monkey small-time coke dealer named Sonny Meeker, had been hounded by the cops for months, but they'd never been able to make anything stick. Even as a boy Jenks believed Meeker had killed his sister, and he'd sat in the darkness of his bedroom planning to someday prove it. But a few years later Meeker had turned up floating in Lake Ronkonkoma with four .22 bullets in his eyes. It was gratifying but not quite enough.
Mrs. Mallory figured the recorder out, rewound it to the beginning and played what he'd heard so many times before.
VOICE A: "The kid's over there."
VOICE B: "What?"
VOICE C: "Give it back. It's mine!"
VOICE B: "Hello? Hello?"
VOICE A: "The girl's dead. Don't."
VOICE C: "Give it to me!"
VOICE A: "Who is that?"
VOICE B: "What?"
VOICE A: "Hello?"
VOICE C: "Shh…he'll hear you."
VOICE A: "What?"
VOICE B: "Tell me your name."
VOICE C: "That's my brother. I need him. Get him."
Jenks' chin snapped up. Christ. His back muscles tightened and a film of sweat broke on his forehead. He sucked air through his teeth and said, "Play it once more, please."
Everybody turned, including the cameraman, swinging his lights over onto Jenks. They all recognized him-even Tracy-and were instantly bored with him. Still, they'd be inclined to ask a few questions, the same ones they always hit him with.
Mrs. Mallory drew some of the looping hair from in front of her eyes and punched rewind again. Pressed play. She leered at nothing while she listened, neck crooked to balance her do. One of the reporters stretched in his seat and did a poor job of covering a yawn.
They hadn't done their homework. They didn't realize the voices weren't exactly the same this time around.
"Thank you," Jenks said.
The cable channel correspondent came over doing her best to feign interest, ashen eyes threaded with red, edges of her nostrils a little too pink. She'd probably asked to use the bathroom at least twice in the past hour to sniff a couple pinches. As she got closer he realized she was pretty and pixie-ish but most of the cutie-pie looks were drawn on with heavily applied make-up. He figured she had about another six months on TV before they gave her the hook.
She didn't bother to introduce herself, just said, "Channel Twelve News" and launched into the inquisition. Good, get it over with. She continued buffeting him with the lusterless questions they'd been asking for years, and though he gave carefully prepared replies there simply weren't any answers to go around. The amiable grin went dry and caked on Jenks' face, and his irritation continued growing minute by minute. He kept a polite front until the cable chick, with enough wax on her lips to fill a candelabra, asked him, "Do you still miss your sister?"
Sometimes they wanted too much and the fist closed tightly on his heart. Jenks let his own hollow smile drop as he leaned toward her until they were nearly nose to nose. She backed up a few feet and moved directly into the cold spot. There were three of them throughout the house that he knew about. The color drained from her face and she shuddered so violently that her back teeth snapped together and her elbows popped. The cameraman and sound guy, afraid of what might happen next, both slung the equipment off their shoulders and braced themselves.
Jenks said, "On occasion."
Easy enough. He turned and walked into the living room, where the girl was finishing up a piece of pizza. Her eyes were on him, and she was waiting.
The reporters left without a word to him, and the cable crew slid out the front door en masse, murmuring.
Jenks introduced himself to Mrs. Mallory and sat. They'd spoken only briefly on the phone but she'd been friendly. Thrilled, really, and he could understand why-how wild it was to become a part of the urban myth culture.
Now she spent a minute on pleasantries, offering him coffee, diet coke, sesame seed bagels, and apologizing for the busted couch springs. After that they hit the usual barrier of silence. He'd found there was nothing he could ever say to help anybody get through it. They had to come around on their own, get used to the idea of what they were really talking about in front of him. His murdered sister.
Finally she was ready, perked in her seat and said, "Well, Mr. Jenks, we've been here in the house for six years. Of course, we've played the tape recorder game several times."
"Sure."
"On Halloween, the way you're supposed to."
He nodded. "According to the legend."
"Right, that's why we did it. Just to see."
"Everyone who's lived in this house after my family has done the same."
It got her wondering and she asked, "How many have there been? Owners since you moved away."
"Five, including yours."
She pulled a face, gave the wide eyes. "I didn't realize there had been so many. Five in twenty years, that's a lot. Nothing ever happened to us, I mean, no noises or apparitions. No flies or blood in the tub, those things like the papers in the checkout line say."
"No one's ever experienced anything like that. Just the voices on tape."
"That's what we've always heard. The stories."
She'd been doing all right up until then, meeting his eyes and conversing without becoming disconcerted. Then the sheepish quality began to soak in.
"About my sister," he said.
"Yes, but like I told you, nothing ever happened before when we did the game. Now, my God, those women…they're so miserable and forlorn
."
Jenks didn't agree. To him, they sounded rather petulant, edgy, crazed.
"Why'd you play the game last week?" he asked.
The hairdo was really bothering the shit out of her. Mrs. Mallory kept running her hands across the side of her head trying to push ropes of braids back in place, tie them off so she'd get some equilibrium back. "My husband got a promotion and we're moving to Westchester. I suppose Tracy wanted to try one more time before we left."
He looked at the girl and she cocked her chin at him, clucked her tongue as if daring him to shake her deliberate apathy. Jesus, talk about forlorn.
"Were you alone, Tracy?"
The kid switched gears. The huffy touchiness ran deep in her, and now she threw it way out there. Pursing those broody lips, her gaze was suddenly filled with a sexual wickedness and immature cruelty. "It was just something to do. My boyfriend was over and he's the one who brought it up."
"He's into the occult, that one," her mother added.
"Frankie is not. Just because he wears black and likes horror movies doesn't mean he's into worshiping Satan."
"I didn't say he worshiped Satan, just that he's interested in those kinds of things."
"Was it his recorder?" Jenks asked. "Your boyfriend's?"
"No." Tracy nailed Jenks with that glare again, working it some. Not a seduction exactly, just another way to make somebody uncomfortable. It was starting to piss him off. "I have this tiny voice-activated micro machine one...well, it's my fathers, but I use it most of the time. I write poetry and carry it around in my purse sometimes. You know, I speak bits of verse into it. I suppose he was curious about the stupid legend, so I left it on record Saturday night when Frankie and I went out to the Burger Emporium. He's read all the books on our house, really dug the idea that, you know, that something might happen. Spirits and shit. When we came back, I saw that some of the tape had run. And there they were. Those ladies."
"Where was it? The tape player."
"On the dining room table. But the voices sound like they're further back in the house, in one of the bedrooms."
Jenks nodded. "They always sound like that no matter where the recorder is placed. It would be the same even if you'd put it in your room or out in the garage."
"That's fucked up."
"What do they want?" Mrs. Mallory asked. Now that the excitement had worn off, he could see a splinter of fear working through her. "Why do they speak that gibberish?"
"I don't know."
"Who are the other women?"
"Nobody's certain."
She tried to frame her next words carefully, the way they usually did. "Were there other, ah, violent episodes in the house, before your parents moved in?"
"No. The house was newly built when my father bought it. We were the original occupants. It was one of the first homes put up in the development."
"The neighborhood must've looked so nice back then. Now it's going to seed."
No point in responding, they'd pretty much played their string out and he wanted to be alone in the house.
He entered his old bedroom and found it only vaguely familiar. There was water damage in two corners of the ceiling, dark mottled stains reaching along through cracked plaster. No furniture, just an ugly chipped lamp set on the worn carpet. Tracy was a poster freak but didn't care enough to bring many along to the new place. The walls remained a patchwork of vacuous celebrity faces, most of them torn or hanging at the edges, covered by loose, yellowed pieces of tape.
"I appreciate you letting me stay in your home tonight," Jenks said, surprised by his own sincerity. He'd mentioned the buzz about the possible documentary to her and implied having a role in producing the film. The insinuation being that he'd mention the Mallory family and his night spent in the house for the first time in two decades, maybe do some interviews with them. They'd bit, and his lies bothered him now.
"It won't be ours much longer. We've received several bids and expect to close by the end of the month." Mrs. Mallory gave a heavy sigh of relief. She patted her chest as if to calm her heart. "The new people can worry about all of this stuff. We're already moved into the other house."
"It's on the Hudson," Tracy said from the doorway. "We're getting away from the Satanists."
"Don't start."
"All those kids into the occult, you know, they roam the streets in mobs."
"That's enough…"
"It's a social statement, the Hudson Valley. We're forty-nine minutes from the Museum of Natural History. My Dad clocked it for me. I feel so much more civilized already."
Mrs. Mallory drew herself up and planted her fists on her hips. It was a pose Jenks recognized-his mother used to do it a lot when she was furious, battling with Deb about damn near everything. Mrs. Mallory faced him and said, "She keeps threatening to run away, can you imagine?"
"I'm going to, Ma, just watch me."
"She actually likes it here. In this area."
"There's nothing wrong with our neighborhood!" Tracy glanced at Jenks and licked her lips, a gesture calculated to illicit his help. It only proved how young and careless she was.
"Property values are dropping. The Puerto Ricans and blacks are moving in, you can't even cross Potters Avenue without fearing for your life." Mrs. Mallory gave Jenks a cohort's frown, inviting him to join in.
He didn't mention the fact that she hadn't cared about living in the house where his sister had been dragged away bleeding to death long before the Puerto Ricans had started to step up to Potters Avenue. Jenks also decided that Mr. Mallory must've been one fucked-over dude, forever caught between these two women, always getting the rolling eyes, the sneers, and the cutting scowls during every quarrel.
"Which one is she?" Tracy asked. "Your sister, I mean."
"Voice C," Jenks said.
"Which is that?"
"The one that says 'give it to me,' and 'give it back.'"
"The one that talks about needing her brother."
"Yes."
"And that's you."
Jenks was getting a little worried about it too, but tried to keep himself steady and focused.
"What's she want?"
"Maybe I'll find out tonight."
"That's too weird." Tracy held the micro-recorder by two fingers as though it were a dead mouse and handed it to him. "Here," she said, backing off down the hallway. "I'm leaving this fucking thing behind."
Mrs. Mallory made a false start to go after her, then gave another theatrical sigh and threw her hands down. She turned to Jenks again, and he saw the very real sorrow in her eyes and suddenly felt pity, even if she was going to live in Westchester.
"Dress warmly," she said. "We've contacted the gas company and they're due to disconnect at 5:30 this evening."
"I've got a sleeping bag in my car."
"We'll have electric until the morning though. I don't know if you remember, but the bedrooms don't have overhead lights. As you can see there's a cruddy lamp we're leaving behind that you can use."
"Thanks again."
A slowly growing tension became even more palpable and Jenks sensed she wanted to say more. It either would come out or it wouldn't. The beautiful unyielding faces around him looked insane with wealth and happiness.
"I don't think you should stay," she said.
That stopped him. "Really? Why not?"
"Those last words on the tape. That was your sister Debra talking, wasn't it?"
So she wasn't quite as self-absorbed as he'd thought. "Yes, I believe so."
"And they were new. They'd never been heard before, all those other times." She held his gaze for a moment, expectant and watchful, but he didn't say anything. "It sounded like she expected you to come."
"I think so too."
"Perhaps it's not such a good thing."
"She may need me. Wherever she is. To find peace."
He was sweating again, his breath hissing. He couldn't get over how different Debra sounded on the tapes, enraged and ruthless.
&n
bsp; Mrs. Mallory brought it all home, like a blade between the ribs, telling him, "Maybe that's not what she's looking for."
Darkness settled, and moonlight ignited the paper smiles. He listened to oak branches scratching at the roof in the heavy winds, but the asphalt shingles had been replaced with wooden ones and the sharp clattering noise began to grate on him.
Lying on his sleeping bag in the empty frigid house, Jenks slowly let his own incessant questions drift over him once more. Who were the other women with his sister? What were they all doing together? What did those disjointed fragments of speech mean?
Over the years he'd managed to segregate his emotions so the frustration wouldn't drive him out of his head, but now they all became a boiling stew. His grief and longing, the disappointment and lack of fulfillment, the nearly lifelong quandary of unfinished business. If she wanted him back here so badly, why didn't she talk to him?
Meeker, it had to have been Meeker.
If so, it shouldn't matter anymore, but of course it did. Jenks tried to force himself to sleep, pondering if she'd be able to reach to him in his nightmares, if the other women might show and introduce themselves, and he could help get to the bottom of all their pursuits and heartaches. And they could guide him past his own.
His cell phone rang and Jenks answered. "Hello?"
"Hello? Hello?"
"Yes?"
"What?"
It was Voice B, still holding to the script. "Hello? Hello?"
At least this was something new, having them moving into the phone. Did they need to make contact that much more now? Or was he just growing more sensitive back in the house, in tune with their needs?
"Hello, B," Jenks said. "This is a new trick. What can I do to help?"
"Tell me your name."
"I'm Matt Jenks," he said. "Now tell me yours."
"Tell me your name."
"Put my sister on."
"Hello? Hello?"
He hung up. Let B or one of the others call back, if they had something to say to the living world.
Christ, just show yourselves, with or without the sheets, the bobbing balls of light. How much harder could it be for them to appear? If they could jump into AT&T and give him a ring, why couldn't they just flutter past? A veiled shape floating down the hall. A shadow that turns corners.
Futile Efforts Page 4