Gin Palace 02 - The Bone Orchard

by Judson, Daniel

  I stopped in my tracks and stood there, still, with my eyes on the ground, listening. Quiet was everywhere. The only sounds had been my footsteps on the gravel, and now that I had stopped there was nothing at all to hear but my breathing. After a moment I started walking again.

  I followed the lawn around the left side of the house to the backyard. It was brighter there, the shadow of the house being cast on the front yard by the muted morning sun. When I got to the backyard I saw that the garage was on the right side of the house, across the lawn. I stopped again and listened and this time looked around. I could hear the faint hiss of the ocean, a half mile to the south. But that was all. The neighborhood felt abandoned, like winter was an enemy that drove everyone out.

  I looked then up at the house. Up close it had the feel of a great wooden ship that had run solidly aground. I looked at the windows reflecting the November sky. There was nothing, no one, behind the ghostly reflections on the glass. I looked at them for a long time.

  Maybe there I had found my reason not to proceed. Maybe it was the gray skies in those windows that spooked me, that eroded my resolve. For whatever reason, I felt suddenly too deep into enemy territory. The compulsion that brought me this far was diminishing fast. I still wasn’t sure just what exactly it was I expected to find by being there. All I did know was that Augie was in jail and I had no leads. What was it I was hoping a look at this place would tell me about the Currys that their address already didn’t? I had to do something to help Augie, but this suddenly didn’t feel like it.

  I felt the urge to bolt. I considered that the last thing I needed was to get picked up here for trespassing by one of the Chief’s boys. I would be no help to anyone then, and so I decided fast that I had seen all there was to see – a great, empty house, nothing more – and was turning to get the hell out of there and back to the Hansom House and my part of town when something stopped me.

  There was a wide set of stairs leading up to a back porch and a set of French doors at the rear of the house. One of the panes of glass in the French door was broken, punched in. I stared at the door for awhile before I finally found what it took for me to begin to approach. When I reached the wide stairs I waited again, staring at the door, then started up them. When I was halfway to the top I could see that there was no broken glass under the shattered pane, no glass outside the door. I stepped onto the porch and walked to the door and could see that the all the broken bits of glass had fallen inside. It was then that I saw that one of the French doors was slightly ajar.

  Somewhere inside a phone started to ring. It rang seven or eight times, then ended. I looked through the French doors into a long hallway that ran straight down to the front door. It was wide and there was a long table against one wall. Across from it was an armoire. Paintings and antique mirrors were hung on the white walls. The hall had the look of a gallery, bright even in the pale morning light and a little sterile. Nothing, however, seemed to me to be out of place. There were no bare spots on the wall where a painting should be. Nothing but the window seemed disturbed.

  The doors opened out, so I put my hand in the pocket of denim jacket and gripped the handle, pulling the door open just enough for me to slip in. I was careful not to step on any of the broken glass or tiny shards or fine dust that covered the floor.

  On the wall inside the door was a security system touch pad. A small red light indicating that the system was disarmed was lit. Whoever broke in had known the code. I wondered if maybe someone had forgotten or lost their key, but the door was left open and the house seemed empty.

  I moved quietly, cautiously. My heart was pumping uncomfortably. With each step deeper into the gallery I thought of Augie and Frank and blocked out all thoughts of the Chief and his boys.

  There was a Pollock on the wall. It was the first thing I saw. It was a piece of shit. Near it was a de Kooning. The Pollock was a large painting. I knew it probably carried a steep price. My adoptive mother had collected some paintings, most of them South American, but her true passion was antique rocking and carousel horses. You couldn’t walk into a room in that thirty-room house without tripping over one. The Curry house wasn’t like that; it was neat and cold and sparse, everything in its place. The house I grew up in was dark and cluttered and full of, like many of the old houses out here, secret rooms. Even in these there was some kind of representation of a horse standing about somewhere, some costing as much as a hundred grand.

  Most of the art on these walls was New York or East Hampton art, most big names. I walked through the hall till I came to the long table alongside the wall. There was nothing on it but a Tiffany pear tree lamp. There wasn’t a hint of dust. With my hand in the pocket of my denim jacket I opened some drawers and found nothing but mail. Most were bills but some were personal letters addressed to James Curry. I checked the return addresses but saw nothing that seemed noteworthy. I closed the drawers carefully, quietly, then crossed the hall to the armoire. I opened its doors and found a bar stocked with expensive gin, Scotch, and a variety or cordials. Behind the bottles was a mirror. I saw my reflection and recognized the look of disbelief in my eyes. I shook my head, as if to say to myself What are you doing?

  I closed the doors and followed the hallway to its end. I was now at the front of the house, near the front door. To my right was the entrance of a side room and beside that a flight of stairs. To left was the entrance to another room. I paused to listen before looking into the room to my left. It was family room, complete with a large screen TV and a stereo system. Nothing was out of place. I stepped to the room to my right and looked in. It was dining room. A heavy oak table was preset with silverware. There were ten places set, dozens of pieces of silver there for the taking.

  I looked up the flight of stairs to the landing above. It was a catwalk that looked down on the gallery. I waited and listened before starting up the stairs. The wide wood planks creaked little, but every sound, no matter how little, seemed too loud. At the top of the stairs I had the choice of turning left or right. I turned right and followed a hallway that led past several rooms, their doors opened. I walked down, passing each room, looking in. They seemed in order and looked to me like guest rooms. This hallway ended at another, smaller family room. Again, nothing was out of place.

  I turned and crossed the catwalk to the hallway to my left. Nothing unusual: a study, a full bathroom, a small workout room, all perfectly ordered. I looked in each and then came to the room at the end of the hall. I stopped dead.

  This last room was trashed, ransacked. The mattress was overturned and torn. Pillows were gutted. The bureau top and shelves were bare, their contents cast to the floor. It took a moment, but I could tell by the belongings that this was a girl’s room, more specifically a teenage girl’s room. There were stuffed animals about and the remnants of pop star posters that had been torn from the wall. I scanned through the mess till I saw half lying under a heap of bedding a framed photograph of a smiling and tanned girl on a sailboat. It was Amy Curry, I could tell that from where I stood. She was beautiful, radiant with life, maybe fifteen, maybe sixteen.

  Downstairs, the phone started ringing again. I counted nine rings altogether. Once it was done silence returned abruptly to the house. I waited a moment, looking over the room once more, and then I heard the sound of a car door close outside, coming from the direction of the garage. I went into the next room, which overlooked the right side of the house. Below a brown Mercedes sedan was parked outside the garage. A man carrying a briefcase and a suit bag was walking toward the house. All I could see was the top of his head, dark with flecks of gray that looked like scattered paint.

  I broke then from my stillness and bolted. I took the stairs two at a time, reached the bottom, and turned toward the back door. Behind me I heard a key working the lock of the front door. It clicked, and then the door began to open. I was nowhere near the back door yet and had no choice but to duck through a side door. I found myself in the kitchen and waited, panting.

  I
heard the man at the front door enter and pause. I figured he must have been at the keypad, which read “disarmed.” Then I heard him say, “What the fuck,” and I knew by this that he had spotted the French door with the broken pane. I heard heavy footsteps start then. He walked with certainly toward the door. I waited just inside the kitchen door, uncertain just where I was going to go now and not knowing how he couldn’t hear me in such a quiet house. I listened to his footsteps approach and ignored my pounding heart beating against my ribs. He was about halfway down the gallery and I was in real trouble when the phone rang again. It stopped him. He turned and headed back through the gallery to the family room. I waited till he answered and heard his voice, distant, muffled, but clear enough. “This is he,” he said. “Yes. What? What…? This must be a mistake. When? Oh, Jesus. Jesus. I’ll be right there. Yes. I’ll be right there.”

  I knew then that it was one of the Chief’s boys on the other end notifying Amy Curry’s next of kin. Amy’s father let out a final denial as I slipped out the back door and down the steps to the brittle grass. I made it around the house and to my car quick. I got in and got the hell out of there.

  Later I went out to the Texaco station and bought the Southampton paper with the change from my ashtray. I was still shaken by my foolishness but I needed to look for another job and figured I could do that while I waited for Gale to call.

  Tina was asleep in my bed, so I sat on my couch and laid the paper out on the coffee table and looked through the help wanted ads. There wasn’t much to choose from. This wasn’t the time of year to be looking for a job. But there was an ad for a dishwasher at the LeChef, the French restaurant on Job’s Lane. I knew the owner’s wife from the college. I circled the ad and closed the paper and glanced at the cover stories. A Hampton Bays teenager was arrested two nights ago and charged with running heroin from the city to Bridgehampton. An East Hampton businessman whose abandoned Lexus was found a week ago was still missing. As I skimmed the articles, I wondered if some night soon the mother of the teenager would come looking for me telling me that she had heard of me, asking for my help. Or would it be the wife of the well-respected businessman asking me to find him and bring him home safe since it was now painfully clear to her that no one else could, or would? I told myself that all that had nothing to do with me. I chanted it like a mantra. This wasn’t me. This wasn’t me. This wasn’t me.

  As I thought this I continued looking through the paper. It was always better to see it coming, even if, it turns out, it wasn’t really coming at all, even if all it turned out to be was a close call. I liked the feeling of being prepared, even if that feeling was little more than an illusion. Sometimes all it took to get through to morning was an illusion. So I read on. But I could spot nothing, so I closed the paper and folded it and thought about the fact that I had rent to pay. Then I got tired, so I put the paper down and lay back on the couch with my arms folded across my chest like a corpse and sensed the still apartment around me. I fell asleep easily and dreamed of my father, of him waving me to follow him into some unfamiliar woods. I did not follow him, just stood there and watched him go and felt the pain of his departure. Before anything more could happen I awoke to the sound my phone ringing. I scrambled to grab it quick, thinking of Tina asleep in the other room.

  I caught the phone on the second ring. “Hello.”

  “Mac.” It was Gale.

  “What’d you find?”

  “Nothing. No one came in last night or this morning with any kind of knee injury.”

  “Shit.”

  “Any news from Augie yet?”

  “No.”

  “You boys play too rough.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Keep me posted, Mac.”

  “I will.”

  I hung up and looked toward the bedroom. Tina was standing in the doorway. She was wearing one of my tee shirts, her long bare legs running like the two steep sides of a narrow triangle to the floor.

  “Who was that?”

  “Gale.”

  “From the hospital?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did she want?”

  “She wanted to know if I’d heard from your father yet.”

  “Have you?”

  I shook my head.

  “What time is it?”

  I didn’t know. Tina turned and looked into the bedroom, at the secondhand windup clock by my bed.

  “It’s almost noon,” she said. “Are you hungry?”

  “You should put some clothes on, Tina.”

  “I went out and bought some food. You had nothing. You know, you need to keep up your strength, especially after last night.”

  Tina didn’t move from the bedroom doorway. “You’re home now. Do you want me to leave? Do you want me to go back to Lizzie’s?”

  “I’m going back out,” I said. “I need you to wait for Augie’s call.”

  She nodded. “Okay. Did you find whomever it was you were looking for?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You look tired.”

  “Tina, put something on, please.”

  She waited a moment before turning impatiently and going into the bedroom. A minute later she came out with jeans on and the tee shirt tucked in. Her limbs were lanky, her torso narrow, like a girl’s, but in places she was a woman, the worst place being her mind. I ignored her obvious bralessness. My mind had wandered back to my dream and for now I was stuck there.

  She looked at me for a moment, studying my face closely.

  “You were thinking about your father, weren’t you? I can tell by that look on your face.”

  We had gotten to know each other too well during our three months crowded together under the same roof. I had taken lately to acting a little cold toward her, to keep at a distance. It seemed the more my guard was up, the more she needed to try to bypass it.

  “I was just remembering a dream I had.”

  “About him?”

  I nodded.

  “You miss him.”

  “I never really knew him, Tina. I mean, I have a few memories, but I have no real idea who the man was.”

  “Why didn’t he … keep you? Why did he send you to live with that creepy family?”

  “I don’t know. I’m sure he had his reasons.”

  “You know, you never talk to me about how you grew up, except that it was hell.”

  “I don’t talk to anyone about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s just not something I talk about.”

  “Did he hurt you?”

  “Tina.”

  “Is that how you learned to fight, defending yourself against your adoptive father?”

  “Tina.”

  “Why don’t you talk about it? He was your father.”

  “He wasn’t my father. My real father wasn’t my father, as far as I’m concerned. I had no father, just two men who are no longer a part of my life, okay?”

  Tina looked away. “I don’t know what I’d do without Augie,” she offered.

  “You won’t have to worry about that.”

  She took a step toward me and looked at me square, as if searching out an opening in my guard, and said “Are we ever going to be normal? You and I, I mean. Are we ever going to be like we were before all this started?”

  “Let’s get your father straightened out first,” I told her, my eyes locked on a distant, bare wall.

  “I can’t pretend I don’t feel what I feel, Mac.”

  “No one’s asking you to.”

  “You don’t want to even look at me, let alone hear what I’m feeling.”

  “We’re allowed all our feelings, Tina. We’re just not always allowed to act on them.”

  “I gave up trying to seduce you a long time ago, Mac. My schoolgirl crush is way over.”

  “You know my concerns,” I said. “You know my situation with the Chief.”

  “If he’s your enemy, then vanquish him.”

  I looked at her and laughed. I had neve
r heard her speak in that way before. “You are your father’s daughter.”

  “We’re reading Julius Caesar in English.”

  “Finish it, then we’ll talk all you want about that particular school of thought.”

  “Sometimes I just don’t understand you.”

  Deeply tired, not wanting this at all, I muttered, “Yeah, well, join the club.” I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my palms, digging in deep.

  “You never used to be like this, Mac. You used to be someone people could count on. When the Chief’s son and his friends tried to rape me, you went through them like they were nothing.”

  “And look where it got us.”

  “My life would be shit right now if you hadn’t been there, if you hadn’t done what you done.”

  “You don’t get it, Tina. I don’t regret having saved you. I’m just tired of it all. When I did what I did to the Chief’s son, after you were safe, when we were free to go, I kept going, out of rage, out of greed, and I set into motion events that resulted in the death of three people. I have blood on my hands. I want the blood off and I want to keep it off.”

  Tina looked toward the windows and the November gloom beyond them. She was thinking something through. I could tell this by the look on her face. I’d give her whatever time she needed.

  Finally, she said, “After they killed Caesar they washed their hands in his blood.”

  “Wasn’t very bright of them, was it?”

  “No. Marc Antony walked in and took one look and knew exactly who killed Caesar.”

  “There are consequences to every action we make. Everyone around here is so reckless, Tina. Frank, the Chief, ever your father. Even I used to be reckless. I don’t want to be that anymore. No one dies because of me again. No one. So the pieces stay in place, and once your father calls, you go home to him and you stay away from here, okay? I’m going to help your father, I promise, and everything’s going to be fine, as long as the pieces stay in place. Will you help me keep them there?”