by Joey Ruff
As my head swam with haunted memories and recent ghost manifestations, I passed the time watching Anna on my phone. I hated the thought of leaving her, alone beneath Seattle, but at least I had my nanny-cam.
Once we reached our altitude and the No Phone light was extinguished, I had pulled my mobile phone out and waited for it to connect to the plane’s wi-fi before booting up the app. There was a haze of static before the camera’s feed came into focus, and then there it was: the little stone ring surrounded by old, fire-charred brick. The misty waters within swirled and, within seconds, showed me Anna. She appeared, as she always did, in a somber state of being: eyes closed, sitting up straight, dressed as if for a fancy party. Her long brown hair was pulled back and held in place by a ribbon. She looked at peace, which was such a stark contrast from the last memories I had of her, on the breathing machine, tubes coming from her arm to the IV bag hanging beside her, her thick, dark hair matted to her head in a perpetual glaze of sweat from the fevers that came and went.
She was always shown to me as sitting, waiting, sometimes on a bus bench in the park, sometimes in a subway terminal or train station. At times, she was sitting in a room that was stark white and void of ornamentation, possibly a doctor’s office or a court room. Still other times, it was just her, set against a black backdrop, with no discernible light source, yet no part of her hidden in shadow.
This time, she was sitting at a bus station, all alone – always alone – with her hands folded in the lap of her blue dress. It looked like the dress Alara had bought for her fourth birthday. It was her first birthday after her diagnosis. No, that’s not accurate. She was never diagnosed. The doctors were unable to tell us which disease was ravaging her. Her killer was never given a name. Her first birthday being sick.
That particular birthday, we were in London. I was on holiday from work, having just closed a big case, as I was still on with the Metro Police. We took a week in the country, a cottage house that belonged to a friend of Alara’s mum, and had just arrived back in the city. We spent the day at Piccadilly Circus, had Scotch Eggs and a slice of birthday cake in Fortnum and Mason and caught a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Criterion. Anna sat between us, too young to understand what was happening, but her eyes were wide as she took in the bright costumes and dancing.
That was the last time I remember us being together as a family and happy. The sickness wasn’t full onset, at the time, though the doctor’s predicted it would soon get worse. Which it did. Her health would deteriorate quickly, and we would be left searching for answers as our lives quickly spiraled and escalated into a series of doctor’s visits and tests.
After the show, it was late, so we got a room in the city. We put Anna to bed and shared a bottle of wine on the balcony that overlooked the Thames. Lara reclined back against my chest as we watched the boats go by.
“Today was nice,” she said. “Thank you.”
“The whole week was nice.”
“Yes, but…oh, you know what I mean. I did enjoy the country, but I’m not a country girl.” She took a sip of her wine and held the silence for a while. “Do you think Anna had a good time?”
“I think she really enjoyed the production.”
“What do you think will happen next?”
“What do you mean?”
“With Anna,” she said. “Do you think she’ll get worse?”
“I’m trying not to think about it, Love.”
“If they could just diagnose her, then we could give her the right medicine, and she can get better. Be a normal child.”
“Lara… I don’t know if…”
Her weight suddenly shifted, and she spun to look at me, nearly spilling her wine all over my shirt as she stuck me in the chest with her finger. “Don’t you dare. Not now, not ever. Do you hear me?”
I nodded.
“You love me?” she asked.
“With everything I am.”
“You love her?”
“More than life itself.”
“Then you promise me, right here and right now, no matter what happens, John, you will never give up on our Anna.”
“I…”
“John. Promise me.”
I nodded again. “I do. I promise. I will never give up on her. No matter what.”
I was jolted from the memory by the crackling noise of the loudspeaker and the flight attendant announcing that the plane was beginning its descent, put the tray tables in the upright blah blah blah and turn off electronics. I took one final look at Anna, sleeping and waiting, for what, I didn’t know, but just being at peace. I smiled to myself that, even after she’d been dead for nearly twenty years, I hadn’t broken my promise.
When we stepped from the plane, the first thing I noticed was the absolutely unbearable humidity. I could nearly take a drink every time I swallowed, just from breathing the air…which I tried not to do, as it smelled like urine and cigarettes mixed with jasmine. Intermittently, the scent of fried chicken overpowered everything else, but only for a fleeting moment.
After we’d gathered our luggage, we picked up the rental car Nadia had reserved – some American car with efficient gas mileage, something Ape would likely never be caught driving – and she drove us North, across Lake Ponchartrain. It was an hour drive, and after the flight, I was just ready to stretch my legs.
As we pulled into the city limits, I asked, “So, how are we supposed to find this Ezra?”
“It’s not like it’s a big place, Jono,” Nadia said. “Somebody’s got to know her. We could stop at the gas station and ask.”
“Or we can stop at a fucking diner because I’m starving.”
“I could eat, too,” DeNobb said from the backseat. “Those airplane peanuts are long gone.”
“Fine,” she said. “Gator Bacon okay?”
“What the…?” I followed her gaze to the sign that hung above a little diner. Sure enough, the place was called Gator Bacon. “They really play to the stereotypes here, don’t they?”
We entered and took the table that seemed furthest from the door. It was a small town, the kind where everyone knew everyone, and a bloke couldn’t walk into a diner in a town like that without every eye training immediately to him. Every hushed whisper quickly became directly about the strangers.
Most of the occupants were denim-clad, small-town folks with wide-eyed stares, huddled together in groups, looking around, nervously chewing, like cows waiting for a thunderstorm. One man stood apart. It wasn’t because he was the only person eating alone, wasn’t the fancy suit and tie, the slicked back white hair, or the way he seemed completely oblivious of our arrival. What made this man so interesting in a room of cattle was his complete and utter confidence. He was the wolf in the pasture, getting ready to prey. Or maybe, he was the guard dog. I watched him as we crossed the room, but if he noticed me, he gave no signal. He just continued to eat his eggs and hash as if nothing could ever bother him.
The cushion on the booth squealed as I slid across it, causing me to become even more self-conscious, if that were at all possible. Within minutes, the waitress came over. The only thing particularly noteworthy about the woman was how much of a caricature she was. She was a middle-aged white woman what wore her red hair up in a bun. There was too much mascara behind her thick, plastic-framed spectacles. She was chewing gum like the old cow that she was, and that small-town attitude seeped into her every word. When she said, “Get ya’ll some coffee,” in her thick, redneck, backwater accent she may as well have said, “Who the fuck are you?”
I was too tired to play the game. “Yes,” I said. “Make mine a double.”
“Like yer accent, honey. Where ya from? Australia?” While it sounded like a compliment on the surface, it was interpreted as, “You’re a long fucking way from home.”
“Sure,” I said. I’d been in the States for so long, my English was Americanized. It didn’t play well to stupid Americans.
“Ya’ll need a minute?”
“I just want eggs,”
Nadia said. “And toast. Wheat, please.”
“We’ll all do that,” I said. “And bacon. Is it really made from alligator?”
The look that woman gave me suggested I had just punched her in the stomach while speaking ill of her sickly grandmother.
“It’s made from pigs,” she said, adding extra emphasis on the last word. “It’s bacon,” she added, as if I were the idiot.
“You do realize the name on the outside of the building…”
“Jono,” Nadia said, shaking her head.
I sighed. “Forget it. Pig bacon would be wonderful.”
“I want pancakes,” DeNobb said. “Extra syrup. Do you have pie?”
“Peach or blueberry?”
“Peach. Thanks. And a water.”
She left the way she came, annoyed and sullied by our very presence. Once she left, I thought to comment on the pig bacon or the fact that DeNobb was eating diabetes for breakfast, but I was possibly too jet-lagged to talk. I had even pulled out my mobile to check on Anna, but I closed my eyes for a second and let the phone fall idly to the tabletop. After a minute, I opened my eyes to find Nadia fooling with it. “What are you doing?” I asked.
She didn’t look at me, just flashed me a small, white square of paper with writing scribbled across it. “Terry gave me the login for the security feed at the house. I just wanted to check on him.”
“Security feed? The house has cameras, too?”
She looked over her nose at me, but didn’t say anything. I shrugged. “Just put it back when you’re done, okay. I don’t want to check on Anna later and find Ape taking a shit.”
Before she could answer, the waitress returned with three coffee mugs and a pitcher, Nadia asked, “Maybe you can help us with something? We’re in town visiting an old friend. A woman named Ezra King. Do you…know where we can find her?”
“Nope. Sorry,” she said, though it sounded more like, “Piss off.”
“Look, I’m not trying to be rude,” I said. “We’ve just flown all night and are quite tired. Then we drove an hour to come here, only to find that alligator bacon is made from pigs, and you’re expecting to do this song and dance. We can save that for the other tourists. I’ll save you the time, Love. You tell us where Ezra King lives, and your tip jumps from zero dollars to fifty. Makes things a little smoother, doesn’t it.”
She had placed each of the mugs on the table and was filling them from the pot, but had suddenly stopped. She looked up at me, this time with a look of shock that was grossly out of placed. You would have thought I’d just punted her Chihuahua across the room.
“Sir,” she said, which happened to mean, “Mother fucker…” She stopped, studying me with dead eyes through thick frames. “If she’s a friend of yours, shouldn’t you know where she lives?”
“It’s…been a while,” said DeNobb.
She turned her attention to him for a half-second before looking between Nadia and me. “You say fifty?”
I nodded.
“Make it a hundred.”
“Fine,” I agreed. It was Ape’s credit card.
“I knew you was trouble the moment you walked in,” she said, little more than a mumble. “You friends of hers, after all.”
I watched her for a minute, growing impatient.
“She don’t live in town. She got a place out by the swamp. Does those palm readings and such. I’ll…uh, draw you a map. That okay?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll bring your food. You eat it, and you don’t come back. Understand? That mambo ain’t welcome here, we ain’t feeding her kin.” She motioned to Nadia as she said that last bit. It took all I had not to stand up and smack her. Ah, who am I kidding… I was just too tired to do it.
She disappeared, and I drank my coffee. It was fucking terrible, bitter as the hospitality, but it was strong, and it was hot.
The food came ten minutes later with a refill on coffee and a check. On the back of the check, she had drawn the map. She didn’t bother explaining it, didn’t offer us anything else. DeNobb spent half the meal wondering if what came on his pancakes was melted butter or spittle.
Nadia stared at her food for a minute.
“You going to eat?” I asked.
“I’m suddenly not hungry,” she said. “Can you believe the nerve?”
“I would eat. Don’t know when we’ll eat again.”
“That’s very dark,” she said, but took two bites of her eggs and half her toast, anyway. She barely touched the coffee.
I cleaned my plate in record timing and started to work on Nadia’s while DeNobb sucked down his pie. “At least the pie’s good,” he said.
When we left, I didn’t leave a tip. As we pulled away from the curb, the waitress came outside yelling at us. The flabby folds of skin under her arm flapped as she shook her fist at us. I just laughed and focused instead on making heads or tails of the map.
The directions proved to be good, though it took another half hour to find Ezra’s. The place was a half mile back from the highway, set in a little clearing, about a half acre, that was completely surrounded by thick tree growth. The house itself was humble, maybe two bedrooms, with a screened-in porch on the front that held a couple of rocking chairs.
We parked and walked to the house. The air here was less city and more country, though still as humid. It smelled like dead fish and mossy trees. While not a cologne I would buy, it reminded me of home.
As I stepped out of the vehicle, I noticed the herbs I couldn’t identify laid out on a cookie sheet to dry in the sun. A dead chicken hung from a corner of the roof, his neck impaled on a metal hook.
“What’s a mambo?” DeNobb asked, looking uneasy as he stepped out of the car. “That’s what the waitress called this lady.”
“It’s a voodoo term,” Nadia said. “For a priestess.”
“We must be in the right place, then.”
Nadia looked at me, presumably waiting for me to knock on the door, but I just stood there. “It’s your trip, Nad. I’ll follow your lead.”
She took a deep breath, looked nervous. I wasn’t really sure why.
“You okay?”
She nodded. “I just… Never really knew him, ya know. This woman, Ezra…whoever she was to him, she’s a piece of the Huxley puzzle.”
I nodded. “Let’s go put it together, Love.”
DeNobb stepped over to her and slipped his hand into hers. “Let’s do it together.”
I rolled my eyes.
She walked toward the door, DeNobb just a step behind. I followed at a distance. The house was old, and as Nadia knocked on the wooden frame of the screen door, the entire house appeared to shake.
We waited a moment, but there was no sound, no movement. Nadia knocked again, shaking the house a second time. “Hello?” she called.
There was a creak from somewhere within, then a scrape perhaps as a chair was slid back. More rustling before the door opened. The woman that stood before us looked like she was in her late twenties. She had dark chocolate skin and long black hair, kept back off of her face by a colorful scarf worn on her forehead. Her body was lean and lithe, covered loosely by a robe that looked African and hugged her curves in just the right ways to be very flattering. Her eyes were large, her teeth were white and perfect. In total, she looked nearly like a model, which was not at all the type of person I’d expected to find in a far-removed place like this.
She looked at each of us in turn, studying our faces for a small span. When she realized that she didn’t know us, she asked, “Yes?” Her voice was smooth and warm, her tone pleasant but inquisitive. “Can I help you?”
“Uh, yes,” Nadia said. “Hi. Are you…Ezra King?”
“I am,” the woman said with a smile. “I’m sorry, child. I’m not taking appointments today. Can you come back tomorrow?”
Nadia thought about that for a second. “Oh,” she said. “No, we’re not…” She took a deep breath. “This may sound strange, but…did you know a man named Solomon Huxle
y?”
A look of confusion fell across the woman’s face as she said, “Yes.”
Her eyes narrowed and took each of us in turn once again, studying us harder, longer.
“I haven’t heard that name in a long time,” she said. “Who are you?”
“Well,” Nadia said, almost sheepishly. “I’m his daughter. If…you don’t mind my asking, how did you know him?”
There was a moment’s hesitation before Ezra said, “He was my husband.”
6
Ape
It was still dark when I woke. Nadia had given me my pain medication before they’d left for the airport, and the dull throb of pain in my leg told me that it had worn off. I guess that’s why I was awake now.
I could tell at once that the house was empty. Despite the massive size of the house, there was a stillness to it that didn’t exist most nights. When Jono and Nadia were asleep, it was almost like I could feel them. That’s maybe not the best analogy. It wasn’t that I knew where they were in the house, or anything, but it was almost like the house had an aura to it, like the surface of a pond, and when others were around, it was like a ripple across the surface.
When I woke, I knew I was alone, that the house didn’t just feel empty, that it actually was. Since I’d moved back to Seattle, after my parents’ death, the house just felt like a tomb. For a while, I thought the emptiness was inside of me, this barrenness that I just took to be loneliness, because it was just me and Crestmohr on the entire estate, and the groundskeeper never came into the house. But it persisted even after Jono moved in. If he was out on a case and Nadia was in the stable, the place felt like a vacuum. I couldn’t stand it.
If nothing else, having Jamie DeNobb in the house added another ripple to the pond.
As I lay there in the darkness, I could hear a slight shuffling noise. I sat up in the bed and could just make out movement on the far side of the room. Visible in the scant moonlight that bore through the open blinds, Chess stood at the bookshelf with a dusting rag, cleaning it.
For whatever reason, Chess’s presence didn’t lessen the emptiness. Maybe because he was a being of spirit. Sure, he appeared solid and could interact with the physical world, but he didn’t exist in the physical sense, and as far as I knew, was completely unable to leave the house. Or maybe because, for all intents and purposes, he was as much a part of the house as the built-in bookshelf he was cleaning. He’d lived here and taken care of it for generations, although, I didn’t learn of his existence until after the funeral. Maybe those two things were not mutually exclusive. Had I not trained with the Hand of Shanai and La Cosa Nostra and seen things far stranger, meeting Chess may have possibly given me a heart-attack.