In Shadows

by Chandler McGrew

  “How do you know that, old woman?”

  Memere cackled again, then took a healthy taste of the gumbo and smacked her lips loudly. “‘Cause the snake ain’t killed him yet! I tole you! I set a ole snake against you boss, and that snake ain’t done wit him yet. They gonna slither round each other for a while longer.”

  Jules glanced into the far room at the aquarium where the old woman kept the big rattlesnake. He couldn’t figure out how he’d missed the thing before. It was as though the snake and the aquarium had just appeared. But when he did find it, he’d covered it with an overturned end table, just to be sure. This morning he’d awakened to hear the snake snapping again and again at the glass. He was shaken to see that it had cracked the aquarium, and he wondered if it had been trying to get at him. When Memere lifted it out he noticed that the snake had cut itself. A long gash ran from the back of its head halfway down to its rattles. Memere had bandaged it as she might have a human and then put it away again.

  Jules had an idea that the snake in the apartment and the one the old woman claimed to have set against the boss were somehow connected, but he couldn’t see how. It was all just too fucking far out for him. He wanted desperately to be sitting in a bar sipping rum and Coke and shooting the shit with pretty secretaries playing hooky from work, not stuck here baby-sitting this nutcase.

  And it wasn’t just the snake.

  He’d slid the armchair in the living room over to give him a clear view of the old woman when she went into her bedroom. He could see the small window over her bed from there so he knew she couldn’t signal to anyone outside. But so far she hadn’t seemed interested in escaping or trying to draw attention. Instead she just went on with what he assumed were her daily rituals. Cooking her meals. Placing food and rum in front of each of the weird little altars . . .

  That was one of the things that had begun to really bother him.

  So far, he’d seen her put fruits and breads and even bite-size pieces of cooked meat in front of each of the alcoves in the other room. Then she’d fill a shot glass at each station with dark Jamaican rum. And he had yet to see her remove any of the offerings. But each time he went into the room, the offerings were gone. The second time it happened he’d stayed by the door for almost three hours, watching her while she was in there, watching the altars out of the corner of his eye when she was elsewhere. When she went into the bathroom he followed her to the door. When he returned to the altar room all the food and booze had vanished. He searched the whole place while the old woman was still on the toilet. The offerings were nowhere to be found. He stared at the idols and wondered again just what the hell he’d gotten himself into. It was getting to the point where not only was sleep impossible, he was almost too nervous to blink.

  “You gonna sleep all you want pretty soon,” said Memere, laughing into the gumbo pot.

  Jules jumped, jerking his pistol out of its shoulder holster and aiming it at the old woman’s back.

  “Stop doing that!” he screamed.

  She turned to look at him, and he could have sworn that her eyes were glowing. She pointed a long, sharp nail at his face and glared back. “You won’ be a-hurtin’ me none. You boss punish you some awful bad you do dat widdout he say.”

  “I don’t give a shit what he says. You keep fucking with my mind, and I’m gonna blow your head off.”

  She nodded slowly. “All gonna come done soon. My serpent he hurt now. Some dat hurt you boss’s doin’. Some dat hurt Jake Crowley’s doin’. But all same, my serpent he follow you boss to his dyin’ day.”

  “One more day and night, old woman,” said Jules, clicking the safety back on. “That’s what you got. If I don’t hear from Jimmy by then I’m gonna do you anyway.”

  Memere shrugged. “Maybe so you will. Maybe so you won’. But I tinkin’, we gonna be all done soon, anyhow-somever.”

  She laughed again, and turned back to taste the gumbo.

  IRGIL’S SNORE STARTLED JAKE INTO WAKEFULNESS. His watch said it was late afternoon, but his exhaustion argued for the middle of the night. When he heard someone walking through the house, he left Mandi and Pierce by the fire to investigate. At the foot of the stairs he stopped, glancing up at the dancing shadows. Cramer poked his head around the corner of the landing, his lantern blinding Jake.

  “What are you doing?” Jake called quietly.

  “I couldn’t sleep. So I’m checking the place out. Seems like we should have done that before. Come on up.”

  Jake shook his head. “You go ahead.”

  “Fine backup you are,” said Cramer, disappearing.

  Jake sighed. He really didn’t want to climb those stairs. In fact, he hated the thought of anyone being up there. The second floor was a place of both horror and sacred memory, the last spot on earth he had seen his mother alive, and the scene of her bloody death. With agonizing slowness he climbed to the top of the landing, gripping the railing so tightly his fingers ached. Once again he wondered how in the world Mandi had ever convinced him to return to the old place at all that night. Had the jewel been drawing him to it even then?

  The original Jacob Crowley’s portrait hung at the end of the long hallway staring disdainfully at all who entered, but it was the worn cherry side table that held his attention. He stumbled to it in a daze, kneeling beside it, his hand sliding gently down the knurled leg. The wallpaper was still stained with dark, dry splotches. His free hand slipped along the dusty surface of the floor where his mother had lain, and he was shocked to recall even more vivid images of that terrible night, accepting the horror as a penance for the things a ten-year-old could not do.

  Cramer’s voice jarred him. “Are you okay?”

  As Jake rose shakily to his feet, still staring at the floor, he felt Cramer’s giant hand on his shoulder.

  “That where it happened?” asked Cramer softly.

  Jake nodded, and they stood there in silence for a moment until Cramer cleared his throat.

  “You should have stayed downstairs, after all. I’m sorry. That was stupid of me.”

  Jake struggled to look him in the eye. “No. I’m here now. Find anything interesting?”

  “More old house full of sheet-covered furniture.”

  Jake nodded.

  “Looks like an older version of you,” said Cramer, pointing toward the dour portrait on the wall.

  “I’ve been told that.”

  “Must have been a wealthy man to afford a portrait like that.”

  “Before he died, I guess he had quite a bit of money. After all, he owned the whole valley, and I’ve seen pictures of trains of wagons hauling lumber out.”

  “What happened to the business?”

  “The big interests beat him out. Jacob owned a valley. The big timber companies ended up owning most of Maine.”

  “But he kept the land.”

  “The Crowleys have managed to eke out a living in timber since then. But we never built any more houses like this one.”

  Jake followed Cramer down the hall, glad to be moving away from the side table and its memories. Cramer opened the last door and led the way into what had been Jake’s parents’ bedroom. Jake was stunned that he could still smell his mother’s perfume, and the sense of her presence made his knees weak.

  “How many brothers and sisters did your father have?”

  “One. A sister.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She married a salesman and moved away to New York. I don’t think anyone in the family ever heard from her again.”

  “Nobody else but Crowleys ever lived here?”

  “My grandfather had a live-in maid at one time. A housekeeper, I guess you’d call her. My mother spoke of her a couple of times. She was killed by a falling tree.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Why would I be kidding?”

  “What was she doing under a tree that was falling?”

  “Stories like that aren’t so unusual in timber country. My grandfather and my father
had been logging the day before, and they left a tree half-felled. They found her the next day, crushed.”

  Cramer said nothing.

  “What?” said Jake finally.

  “Oh, come on. You’re a cop, for God’s sake.”

  “I guess it does sound strange. But she’d been dead for twenty years by the time I was born. I asked my father about it once, but he wouldn’t talk about family history. The Crowleys don’t reminisce.”

  “I can see why. So the housekeeper went out into the woods and just happened to be standing underneath a tree that your father and grandfather had half-felled the day before. Were they in the habit of leaving trees like that in the forest? Seems pretty dangerous.”

  “I doubt it. But I don’t really know what their work habits were. You think that thing killed her?”

  Cramer shrugged. “What do you think? Do housekeepers around here do a lot of hiking?”

  “To tell the truth I’ve spent the last fourteen years trying to convince myself that the things I saw, the things I knew, the things I’d heard weren’t real. That they were just hallucinations, figments of my imagination.”

  “You don’t believe that anymore, though.”

  “It’s getting kind of hard to hold onto that now.”

  Cramer nodded. “What was the final straw? Why did you really leave?”

  Jake told him everything. The whole story of that night in the house with Mandi, what he remembered, and what she did. Cramer’s bushy eyebrows had knitted together long before the tale was finished.

  “Did your father kill your mother or not?”

  “I don’t know. When I was little I wanted to believe that thing killed her, and then he just found us. But after what happened to me here that night, I began to think maybe he did murder her just like I . . . like I thought I almost murdered Mandi. Now I just don’t know. Pierce thinks the necklace and the thing outside are connected, but that they aren’t the same thing. He thinks the gem is broken, and maybe that’s why that thing is killing people.”

  “Pierce is yours, isn’t he?”

  Jake stared at him, stunned. But he knew he should have expected Cramer to find out. Jake told him about his conversation with the boy.

  “Man,” said Cramer. “This has turned into a hell of vacation, eh?”

  “Better than I ever expected,” said Jake. “If we live.”

  “You planning on dying on me?”

  “Not planning on it.”

  “Good. Then snap out of it, and help me finish searching this house.”

  Jake frowned. “You want to tell me what we’re looking for?”

  “What are we always looking for? Evidence.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of what your family has to do with this curse. Jacob Crowley lived in this valley for a long time without dying. Then something set the damned thing off. I want to know what it was. I think your grandfather and your father knew. So why didn’t your father tell you?”

  “Maybe I wasn’t old enough before he died.”

  “So the knowledge died with him. But there must be something.”

  “I know it sounds crazy, but I’d swear my mother had that jewel on her the night she died. I’m wondering now if Jimmy’s man didn’t take it from Albert. Maybe Albert came up here, found it . . . I don’t know. Both Pierce and I feel drawn to that thing somehow.”

  Cramer nodded thoughtfully. “You had the jewel when the killings happened on the beach. Then you brought it back here and the girl died, Dary Murphy died, and Rich was killed. How come you never mentioned this before?”

  Jake shook his head. “The whole idea just seemed so crazy.”

  “Maybe it’s not so crazy. Memere says that things can have an attachment for people just like people get attached to things.”

  “Maybe Memere’s not as crazy as I thought.”

  Cramer chuckled. “She’s crazy like a snake.”

  “What did she tell you about me?”

  Cramer frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “You wouldn’t have come here without going to see her, without telling her what you were doing. What did she say?”

  “She said your baggage might get both of us killed.”

  “And you believed her?”

  “I always believe her.”

  “But you came anyway.”

  “What would you expect? You think I’m gonna sit on my ass in Houston while you’re up here getting your white ass kilt?”

  Jake smiled. “No . . . I wouldn’t expect that at all.”

  Cramer tossed old clothes out of the closet onto the floor. Jake recognized his mother’s winter coat and winced. The gray wool reeked of mothballs, but he could picture her in it as though the recollection were an old sepia print.

  “What?” said Jake, noticing Cramer staring.

  “The pockets,” said Cramer, nodding toward the pile of clothes.

  The thought of touching the old familiar garment was too much like holding her in his arms. Jake just couldn’t do it.

  “I’ll search the drawers,” he said, turning away to open the old Victorian dresser.

  The smell of mothballs was even stronger there, and Jake was surprised to find that nothing in the room seemed to have been touched over the years. A neat stack of his mother’s nylon underwear lay alongside cotton camisoles and socks. He closed the drawer quickly, rifling through the others haphazardly, feeling like a Peeping Tom.

  “We’re not going to find anything here,” he mumbled.

  “What do these go to?” asked Cramer, jangling a set of keys.

  “They may be my father’s spare car keys.”

  “What happened to the car?”

  “I seem to remember it being sold after the . . . murder.”

  “Thought you said no one locked their doors around here?” said Cramer, flipping several keys on the chain. “These look like they open doors.”

  Jake nodded. “One of them’s probably for the cellar. My father always kept it locked.”

  “How come?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Let’s have a look,” said Cramer, grinning mischievously and leading Jake back out into the hall.

  “What were you guys doing up there?” asked Mandi, yawning at the foot of the stairs.

  “Searching the place,” said Cramer.

  “What did you find?”

  “Nothing but some old clothes,” said Cramer. “Where’s the cellar door?”

  “Under the stairs,” said Jake.

  Cramer unlocked the door, tugging it open when it dragged on the floor. The odor of raw earth circulated around them as Cramer waved the lantern inside.

  “Well,” he said, shrugging. “Let’s have a peek.”

  Jake gave Mandi a long-suffering look. “When Cramer gets his teeth into something, you can’t get them out.”

  “That’s not necessarily a bad thing,” said Mandi.

  She frowned as they heard footsteps, and turned to find Virgil and Pierce standing behind them.

  HE FIVE OF THEM STOOD in the center of the dirt-floored cellar, with its low-beamed ceiling and million cobwebs. Three steamer trunks with corroded metal banding rested against one wall. To Jake’s right a long workbench held numerous dusty woodworking tools and rusty cans of paint. Cramer opened each of the trunks in turn, but all of them were empty. He toyed with an old wood plane on the workbench, peering thoughtfully around.

  “This is an old house with a lot of skeletons in the closet. But we can’t find the closet,” he said. “What’s in there?”

  Jake glanced toward the corner where a dark panel door blended with the shadows of the granite foundation. To his surprise, Pierce was already standing in front of it, jerking at the knob. Jake just shook his head.

  Cramer hurried over, trying keys until he found the one that turned the creaking lock. He shoved the door inward, waving a lantern around in the small space. The ceiling was even lower inside, and he had to lean forward to enter. There was barely space eno
ugh for the five of them to stand. And the room itself was totally empty. Cramer frowned.

  “Why lock an empty room?” asked Cramer, reaching up to feel inside the pockets where the joists rested on the stone foundation.

  Nothing there.

  They wandered back into the main cellar where Cramer made the same inspection of the dusty spaces between the floorboards. Nothing there, either.

  But when they turned to go they noticed that Pierce was down on his knees in the shadowy, empty room, clawing at the hard earth with his bare fingers. When they all slipped back inside, Jake spotted a small exposed area of what looked like old concrete, and he dropped alongside Pierce to help scrape the clay away, leaning past the boy to read the inscription they had uncovered.

  “‘Set herein by Jacob Elias Crowley, August 10, 1886.’” Jake looked at Cramer. “I guess he placed it here when they built the house.”

  “Lift it up,” said Cramer, retrieving a crowbar from the workbench and returning to bury its chisel point in the clay beside the marker.

  The concrete was small and easily moved by the heavy tool. Beneath the lid lay a rusting metal box containing a leather-bound book. Jake lifted it gently and blew off a thick coating of dust.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said, flipping the first page. “‘The Personal and Private Journal of Jacob Elias Crowley.’”

  “The original Jacob?” asked Cramer.

  “My great-great-grandfather,” said Jake, nodding, and flipping another page.

  But Cramer squinted around the dark room.

  “Not down here,” he said, shaking his head.

  Jake sat on the sofa in the study, the journal in his lap. The pages were thin and fragile, and the flowing script took practice to read. He flipped quickly through the beginning, mostly dedicated to the war years, finally slowing about halfway through the book.

  “‘I cannot face the killing any longer. The valor of my men is not in question. Unfortunately neither is the valor of the enemy. Death lies before and behind in a vast sea of gore where the cries of the dying seem to ever dwell in the air. I feel as though I shall never smell a breeze untainted by powder smoke or blood again, that I shall never know the peace within my heart that once dwelt there. I witnessed the charge of Pickett’s soldiers as my men cut them down like wheat before a scythe, and their faces were no different from ours in life or in death. I am told that we won this engagement because of the courage of a stouthearted group of Maine men under Chamberlain. I have met Chamberlain, and I have seen the same dismal distance in his eyes that I know is now in mine. He told me he longed for the faraway green valleys of Maine where death was less than a memory.