I settled for pulling the stuff on the sides away, then sliding the rest out from under the bottom. Whoever had wrapped the box hadn’t been too interested in being neat. They’d just swaddled that thing in paper and tape as best they’d been able, probably to keep it from spilling its cardboard guts when they’d set it down.
The top of the box was a flap that ran lengthwise. An old piece of Scotch Tape, long since gone yellow, held it shut. The knife took care of that. That left opening the lid.
I looked around. Most of the day had gone, and shadows crept across the kitchen. Outside, birds made their evening calls, getting ready to bed down for the night.
Night. I definitely did not want the mystery of what the box had in it gnawing at me all night. Sleep was hard enough to come by, without adding another round of “what-ifs” to keep me restless and pondering. Bare-handed, I leaned forward and flipped the lid open.
I don’t know what I expected. Maybe I’d seen too many bad movies. Even as that lid came up, I thought I might see, I don’t know, maybe a dead animal. Maybe some kind of threat, or a piece of my Audi someone had hacked off. Maybe a body part from someone I knew, though I wasn’t sure what good that might have done.
Instead, there were toy soldiers. They were the good kind, too—molded lead with broad, flat bases and the sorts of guns that someone would call a “choking hazard” today. Their paint jobs were chipped, scarred, and dented from a thousand hours of play, but I still recognized them. Red for Wellington’s British, blue for Napoleon’s French—I’d seen these before. Slowly and with reverence, I took the first one out of the box and turned it over.
There, on the bottom, someone had carved three letters.
J. J. L. So small you could hardly read them, but still there. Still telling the world who these had belonged to, once upon a time.
Joshua Jeremiah Logan. Father. And after him, they’d belonged to me.
I’d spent more hours than I could count fighting old wars in the backyard. I’d sent the French advancing past Mother’s roses, or lined up the British to guard the edge of the driveway. I’d built and smashed a hundred dirt forts, buried a thousand toy casualties and dug them right back up again. They’d been my companions and friends through some long summer days, and when I thought about my childhood, I often thought of them.
Father took them away from me when I was nine when there was a fight with one of my playmates from school over one of our pretend battles, and a couple of the precious soldiers got thrown. None of them hit anyone and nobody got hurt, but that was enough for Father. He came storming out of the house like the wrath of God, his eyes shooting lightning and face dark as thunderclouds. “If you cannot treat these properly,” he said in a voice just this side of a shout, “you cannot have them to play with. Do I make myself understood?” Without another word, he scooped them all up, even the ones we’d thrown at each other in anger, then took them all inside. I stood there, tears leaking down my cheeks, and stared into the house. Mother didn’t come and help me, though. As for my friend—one of the Jericho boys from in town, if the memory doesn’t lie—he just watched the whole thing with his mouth curled into a big wide O.
He made his excuses and called his momma for a ride home not long after that, I recall.
As for the soldiers, Father put them in a big, long cardboard box and carried them off to the attic. That’s where they went and that’s where they stayed, and he never did get around to bringing them back down again.
All except one.
As Father stomped his way around the yard, I moved my foot to cover one of the fallen men. I stood there stock-still, hoping he wouldn’t count. There were twenty men on each side, just enough for a good battle, and just enough that a missing soldier could go unnoticed.
I held my ground there in the yard as Father packed the rest of them away and carried them off to the attic. I prayed I hadn’t broken him, or bent the tip of his gun. And when Father was at last out of sight, I bent down and, quick as a cat, scooped my lone soldier into my pocket. I didn’t let him out until I got to my room and slammed the door, then I hid him on the floor of my closet, behind a big pile of comic books that both Mother and Father knew not to touch. He was my talisman, my good luck charm, and for years I carried him with me whenever I could. Even in high school, sometimes, I’d tuck him in a pocket. My lone British soldier, come along for luck.
I held the soldier from the box up to the fading light and admired it. Stamped lead it might have been, but there was a craftsmanship to it, an attention to detail that caught the breath in my throat. No wonder Father had been so protective. They’d meant as much to him as to me.
And just as suddenly as that realization came, a dark suspicion flew in on its heels. Forty soldiers. Twenty on a side. And one gone with me to Boston.
I grabbed the box from the sink and hauled it over to the kitchen table. It hit the Formica with a dull jingle, as the soldiers jostled against one another. Father would have been mighty steamed, but I didn’t care. There was something I had to know.
One French soldier was in my hand. I set it down on the table. That was one. I reached into the box and pulled out a fistful of his comrades. They spilled out of my hand and I separated them by allegiance—three red, two blue.
Six.
Another fistful; five more Brits this time.
Eleven.
The next handful caught only two, one of each.
Thirteen. Unlucky number. I winced and took out a double handful to make up for it.
Eleven more. It brought the tally up to twenty-four, and the box was still about half full.
Four in the next handful—all French. One had a big strip of missing paint down the center of his back, and I promised myself that if I found time, I’d do something about it. Not now, though.
Twenty-eight.
Five more soldiers spilled out. Thirty-three. The box was getting empty. The table, on the other hand, was getting crowded. I reached into the box, more careful this time.
Three more. Two French, one English. I set them down carefully with their respective sides. My hand went into the box again. I didn’t dare look.
Three more again, but this time with their sides switched.
Thirty-nine. Twenty on the French side, nineteen on the British.
One was missing, like it ought to be.
One soldier had been my good luck charm. I’d taken it with me to Boston to serve as my luck there. When I’d gotten a car, I’d looped string around it and hung it from the rearview. Every time I’d traded in or traded up, I’d taken that soldier with me.
The last time I’d seen it, it had been hanging from the rearview in the Audi.
I took a deep breath.
Put my hand in the box. Felt around.
My fingers closed on a toy soldier.
At midnight I was still sitting at the table with the toy soldiers in front of me. I’d arranged them half a dozen times, and now they stood in four ranks of five, each side facing the other like they were getting ready to fight Waterloo all over again. The box sat behind them, guarding their rear against surprise attacks. Who knew? Maybe my old Barrel of Monkeys would appear next to upset the balance of power.
There was no electric light anywhere in the house. I hadn’t gotten up to turn on the switch, and so everything was as dark as the look in my eye. A little moonlight came through the windows, but it didn’t stay long enough to illuminate much of anything. I hadn’t even bothered to shut the door behind me. Now it swung back and forth in the breeze, creaking every so often when it thought I wasn’t paying enough attention to it.
There were facts here—facts I didn’t like putting together. Fact number one was that those tin soldiers had been in the attic since long before I’d left this house. Fact number two was that only one man besides me had held the key to this house since my Mother had passed on, never mind that he’d been told not to go up in the attic. Fact number three was that one of the soldiers had been in my car the last time
I’d seen it. Fact number four was the increasingly irritating knowledge that my car had disappeared in the recent past. And fact number five was that Carl knew for sure I had been out of the house today.
Now, a logical man could take those five facts and make something of them. He could say, well, the man who had the key would be the only one who could have gotten the toy soldiers. That would also make that man a prime suspect in the disappearance of the car, since he’d gotten that last soldier from the missing vehicle. Knowing I was in town would have given Carl plenty of time to leave the box behind, easy as pie. And if Carl was up for theft and trespassing, he was up for going—unwanted—into the attic as well.
The more I thought about it, the more red rage boiled up in my gut. It all made sense, too much goddamn sense to ignore. More pieces started fitting the puzzle, and when they wouldn’t quite fit, I jammed them in anyway. Maybe Samuel was one of Carl’s friends, sent to drive me into town so I wouldn’t make it back to the house any time soon. Maybe that was why Officer Hanratty had made me walk back, to buy Carl the time he’d needed. Maybe the whole town was against me, the outsider, the boy who went away. Maybe that’s what this was about, and the toy soldiers were a subtle way of letting me know it.
Well, the hell with town, I decided. The hell with all of them. If they didn’t like me because I’d gone away, well that was too damn bad for them. I wasn’t going to be driven out or made to feel the fool by any damn thing they could do. If they wanted to alternate Christmas presents with grand theft auto, that was just fine. I wasn’t budging until I decided it was time to go, and that would be on my timetable, not Carl’s. And when I left, I’d find a new caretaker, too. The thought of him anywhere near my parents’ marriage bed had started to give me shivers, him with his too-possessive attitude toward Mother.
And that got me thinking about how much time he had needed, and what he might have needed it for. “Don’t be stupid,” I told myself. “He returned the key. There’s no way he could have gotten in and done anything. You’re being a fool.”
Mind you, that’s just when I had to go remind myself that he could have made a copy of that key any time in the past ten years. Just because he’d given me one key to this house didn’t mean he’d given up all of them.
The wind got real cold then, and blew in through the open door like it knew where it was going. Without saying another word, I got up from my chair and shut that door, then turned the dead-bolt lock and hooked the chain.
He wasn’t here. With every thinking atom in my body, I knew that. But my gut didn’t listen to the bits that did the thinking, and they were screaming at me to unlatch that door and run.
Instead, I turned on the light. The kitchen suddenly seemed too bright and too ordinary. White counters were empty, the white floor was swept clean. On the table, the soldiers suddenly looked scuffed and old. The cardboard box they’d come in seemed to be about to collapse.
Cursing myself for a coward, I picked up the knife I’d used to open the package and moved deeper into the house. Every light switch I passed, I flicked on. The rooms got smaller in the light, got older and shabbier and less frightening.
Mother and Father’s bedroom I saved for last. With every light in the house blazing and a knife in my off hand, I pushed the door open. Light spilled in from behind me, revealing a perfectly plain rectangle of wooden floor. The rest of the room was hidden in darkness.
I felt along the wall for the light switch, found it, and flicked it on. The light fixture overhead flickered to life. Half the bulbs were burned out, but there were enough remaining to paint the room with a yellow glow. I took a cautious step in and looked around.
The far wall was dominated by an ancient chest of drawers that had been in Mother’s family since time out of mind. The drawers were empty now, I knew, but her collection of knickknacks still rested on top. A small parade of porcelain figures, most of them some kind of dog or other, sat there and waited under a fine film of dust. To the left was Father’s rocking chair, dark wood painted with black lacquer. It had worn away in places, the mark of his hands still here long after he was gone.
But the biggest thing in the room was the bed. It had been a present to my parents from my father’s father, a big four-poster with a canopy. Night tables flanked it on either side. On the right side, the table was bare. That’s where Father slept. The other side was Mother’s, and her table had a washbasin on it. For a moment it looked like there was actually water in there, and my nerves jangled bad enough that I needed to look twice.
Mother loved that bed. Father often joked that it was her oldest child, and I remembered half-thinking he was serious. I could see the polished oak of the columns, still standing straight and tall despite years of neglect. The canopy was there, too, and the bed was made up with Mother’s favorite quilt. Fluffed-up pillows rested at the head of the bed, two on each side.
It all looked freshly made up, and I knew I hadn’t been the one to do the making. With a frown, I ran a finger along the edge of Father’s night table. Only a little dust came away with my touch. There should have been more, much more. Someone had been in my parents’ bedroom. I could guess who, and the thought didn’t make me happy.
Again, the washbasin caught my eye. I took a slow walk around the foot of the bed, my feet landing soft on the Persian rug Mother had been so proud of. Mother’s night table didn’t have any real dust on it, either. Still frowning, I turned and looked at the bed.
From here, I could see a shadow. On Mother’s side of the bed, there was an indentation, a place where a body had been. With my empty hand, I reached out toward it, but then I pulled away. Let it stay there for the police, I thought. Let Carl try to drive his truck over that.
Shoulders tight, I turned and walked back out. I moved the knife from hand to hand and put my left hand on the light switch. One last time, I turned and looked over my shoulder.
For an instant, I thought I saw a second indentation on the bed, next to the first. Then the lights came down, and I shut the door behind me.
eight
The rain started an hour before dawn—fat drops drumming on the roof like soldiers marching. I lay awake in my bed and listened to them. The sound of the storm didn’t bring back any childhood memories. It didn’t bring with it anything at all.
By seven, I stopped trying to fool myself about the possibility of getting any sleep and rousted myself out of bed. The floor was cold, which was a change; for that matter, so was the rest of the house. It felt as though twenty degrees had gone wandering off somewhere during the night, and maybe taken another ten with them. Must have been the rain that did it, I thought, and I shuffled off to the bathroom.
The bathroom floor was wet, which I discovered by nearly falling on my ass when I set foot inside. Idiot that I was, I’d left the window open the night before. The wind had taken advantage of the opportunity, blowing the rain straight through the screen and onto the tile. The bath mat, scraggly old thing that it was, had soaked through, so I balled it up and tossed it into the tub to drain out a bit. It hit the porcelain with a wet slap, and I went to close the window.
It wouldn’t budge. I tried harder, grunting with the effort, but no dice. The window wouldn’t move for me no matter how hard I shoved.
I took a step back and looked closely at the problem. Near as I could tell, the rain had made the wood of the window swell up, so all I’d accomplish by tugging on it would be splintering things that ought not to be splintered. Best to wait, then, for the rain to stop and the humidity to go down, or so I decided. Then I’d be able to close the window. But for now, I’d have to settle for pulling the curtains across and letting them catch the brunt of the storm, then letting things dry out later.
A couple of steps on the wet floor brought me right up close to the window, and I shivered. The rain blowing through the screen was cold, and it splattered on my chest with each gust of wind. The air was chilly, too, with a nasty bite to it. I marveled that I hadn’t felt the temperature d
rop during the night and wondered how the animals outside were handling it. Probably better than I was, I decided, and I pulled the curtains closed. They were a cheerful sort of yellow, a bright shade I’d always hated. Mother had made them, though, so I’d never said a word. Up they’d gone and up they’d stayed, and that had been the end of it. I was pleased, however, to see the fabric start to darken immediately with the impact of the first few raindrops. Even as I watched, streaks of a deeper gold ran through them, ultimately joining together to paint the curtains altogether.
It wasn’t doing much to keep the water out, but I liked the way it looked a hell of a lot better.
Another gust of wind shoved the curtains aside for a moment and reminded me all over again of how damn cold it had gotten. That was enough to convince me that I could wait to take a shower until things warmed up a bit. It also told me that I needed to get out from in front of the window. That wind was fierce, and the raindrops had started hitting with the force of cold needles.
I grabbed the toothbrush and did a quick swipe across my teeth that didn’t fool anybody, then turned and wandered back to my bedroom. My bathrobe—too short, and frayed at the elbows—hung on a hook on the back of the door. I tugged it down and wrapped it around myself, double-knotting the belt to keep the robe tightly shut. It was some kind of plaid that was best described as plain old ugly—red and black lines crisscrossing on a white background—and it fit my mood perfectly. Thus fortified against the temperature, I jammed my feet into slippers that hadn’t fit properly since I was fourteen and made my way into the kitchen.
The rain beat against the windows of the porch door as I made myself a cup of coffee and heated the iron skillet in preparation for making a couple of eggs. There were a couple of sausage patties left in the fridge, so I threw them in the pan as well and went looking for some bread to soak up the grease with. Looking in the icebox was sobering, though. Despite Carl’s odd generosity, there wasn’t that much left in there. One way or another I’d need to get more supplies soon. Food, yes, but I was running out of other things as well, toothpaste and the like.
Firefly Rain Page 7