Boogie House: A Rolson McKane Mystery

by T. Blake Braddy

  I pressed one hand down the side, looking for the handle, and the first raindrops pelted my back and thudded on the wood and dirt surrounding me. Uncle K remained remarkably, uncharacteristically quiet. Even the shuffle of his feet and quiet swish of his pants had receded into silence, but I dared not address him. This was almost done, and not a minute too soon: I felt like I might burst open, like a plastic bag filled with blood punctured by a needle. The edge of consciousness lay only inches away, muddled in the strained darkness of my vision, and I felt myself being dragged away from it.

  Finally, there was enough debris scraped away to attempt to open it. I fingered the side latch. I ignored how bad I felt, how very near the point of collapse I had come, because I only had this one motion to complete. Reach down, pull open the casket, wait for enlightenment.

  There was no flash of lightning as I opened it, but there was a flash of some kind, and something electric shot down my spine. White hot pain exploded in the back of my head, and with reality fading all around me, I peered into the final resting place of one Emmitt Laveau, seeing him for the first time in the flesh. So to speak.

  My senses - or rather my imagination - sharpened by exertion, superimposed the images of Vanessa's face and my mother's face in the space next to Emmitt's already rotting corpse. A trinity of the dead. I screamed out the old voodoo man's name before slipping down, down, down into the darkness, which reached across my field of vision and closed the curtains on the fading afternoon light.

  "I think you are ready," said K from behind me. I felt another sharp pain, and then my lights went out completely.

  Twelfth Chapter

  The night my father killed my mother's lover, Terrence Birrell - when he hung him by the neck and laughed while the man gasped for air and clawed at his throat to relieve the agony - I watched from a nearby row of holly bushes.

  My daddy had told me to stay in the car, that he had some business to do, but of course I hadn’t. I’d slipped out and walked along the edge of the path leading back to where he had gone. I knelt down and watched in rapt horror. I saw the maniacal, unhinged look on the old man's face when he tied the rope around the victim's neck. Two men stood there with him, laughing angrily, spitefully, helping to finish up the disgusting business. Of all the things I could not remember, his accomplices’ identities were the most troubling. Finally recognizing Jarvis Garvey and Jarrell Clements locked everything into place.

  Seeing my father draw a man into the air and then wrap the slack around a stake plunged into the ground was almost eclipsed by my inability to look away. The three men cracked open beers and watched, waiting for the man's dangling feet to stop twitching.

  It was there, under the fragrant and prickly holly trees, that I last prayed to God. Kneeling there in the dirt, staring wide-eyed at this atrocity, straining against inevitable tears, I asked the Almighty to deliver this poor man. He received no such assistance, just more agony.

  My father and the other men taunted and harassed him, spitting beer onto his clothes and hurling obscenities at him. They happily waited for him to die.

  After that, I sort of lost track of the minutes. The nightmare show played out for some time, but I lay amidst the bushes and the brambles and closed my eyes, staying well after the headlights of Clements's and Garvey's cars had gone, when only the dead man and I remained.

  At some point, I fell into a hard, uncomfortable sleep, in which I dreamed about nothing and still seemed aware of my surroundings. My terrified thoughts were drowned out by something else, something that reached out from the darkness and squeezed its cold fingers around my spine. It was a sound, the faintest of croaks, no louder than a grown man's whisper.

  It was the sound of a rope straining against a tree limb.

  Swinging. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth. Desultorily with the wind, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  When I reawakened, I ran, running because it was all I knew to do, relishing the way the tall grass whipped against my clothes, because it replaced the hellish creak of the rope.

  At one point, I tripped and fell against a tree, and when my forehead struck the roots, I saw in that flash of a moment my face transposed over the face of one of those men, my own mock smile glinting in the car's headlights. That image has stayed with me all these years. I walked, bleeding, all the way home and sneaked back into my room after my father passed out. I avoided him, and he didn't mention anything about my disappearance. Two days later, he was in jail, where he would die an embittered, pathetic shell of a man.

  That is one of the reasons, I suspect, I've kept my head down all these years, why I've left the past to be the past. It wasn't until I joined the police force at twenty-five, after watching two planes rip into buildings I myself had never visited, killing people I would never have known, that the distant, underwater feeling broke, and I began the process of swimming back toward the surface.

  Being a police officer never completely changed it, because I continued down the same path, and getting the DUI seemed right in a lot of ways when placed against the background of my life, but even that feeling snapped the moment I saw Janita Laveau standing in my driveway, already having forgiven me on a level to which I could probably never forgive myself.

  * * *

  My eyes opened to the dull sensation of raindrops pelting my forehead. I stared up out of the grave of Emmitt Laveau, above the dirt, into the slate gray sky, where the clouds swirled like an omen of the worst kind. I half expected a rogue's gallery of the undead to be staring down at me, ready to drive me the short distance over into insanity.

  But the sky was all there was, and I was happy to see it, happy that my dreams were just dreams. I leaned forward, sitting up, and immediately shot a hand to the back of my head. I wondered how long I had been out. I didn't bother to call out for Uncle K. Instead, I patted the wetness on the back of my skull and brought my fingers around to see. Blood. The old man had whacked me a good one with the shovel and left me here.

  It was then I noticed, too, that I was covered in dirt. My legs and chest had been covered up, and I had difficulty sitting up and brushing it off. Had the old man planned on burying me? If so, what had stopped him?

  I worked my way out of the grave and heaved myself onto the grass. I rolled onto my back and stared at the abundance of raindrops. Once my legs stopped shaking, I got to my feet and walked unsteadily toward the car, which was nowhere to be found. The old man had swiped it while I was taking a shovel nap.

  Damnit. Wasn't even my car.

  I walked three miles down a cracking, dilapidated back road, soaked head to toe in rain and mud and getting more soaked by the minute, my head throbbing. I was busy trying to invent increasingly filthy words to curse the old man with, should I see him. At least it distracted me from my head.

  I trespassed on an old patch of land that ran right by my house. It, too, was owned by the Brickmeyers. Dried branches and old bushes crackled under my feet like brittle, forgotten remains as I walked.

  I was exhausted. Really tired, despite sleeping in the grave. I was the kind of tired that made me question living. I tried not to think of Vanessa, tried to keep my mind on putting one foot in front of the other, but she kept popping up in my thoughts. Not the Vanessa of my dreams, the Vanessa in tight jeans with a beer in one hand, cigarette dangling from her lips, but the strung-out, junkie body double of Vanessa, unimaginably skinny with frightened eyes. In this image, she pleaded with me to help her, almost understanding that I could not.

  I couldn't muster any emotion beyond misplaced regret. I was pissed at myself, but in a disconnected way, as if something had been unplugged. I wanted to hate myself, to muster up tears, but nothing came. I was just tired and bewildered. The walking wounded.

  * * *

  I went down a tree-lined hill, through an open gate, toward a small pond in the distance. The rain had slackened, but the abundance of gray sky told me the storm wasn’t finished.

  When I was ne
arly level with the pond, I stopped. Standing in the middle of the pathway, I was entirely vulnerable, but still I moved forward.

  The pond had no bank. The grass ended abruptly where the water began. An occasional tree protruded from it, but otherwise it was just muddy brown water.

  Something jutted out above the surface about ten yards out. It was white and metallic and drew me in as if by hypnosis. By the time I realized, I was knee-deep in water and continuing forward.

  It was a truck. A white diesel truck.

  I slogged ahead, smelling mud rise out of disturbed water. The truck had been driven so that it was submerged well above the license plate, but I already knew what I was approaching. The driver's side window was down, and I heard a fly buzz as I looked into the cab, instinctively covering my nose and mouth with a forearm.

  First thing I noticed was that he hadn’t been dead for long. Couldn’t have been. H.W. Bullen sat slumped on the passenger side of the truck, head lolling back with the eyes staring forward. He was a bloody mess. The passenger side window existed only in jagged shards that protruded from within the door like broken teeth. I saw two gunshot wounds - one in the neck and the other in the chest - before I backed away in disgust.

  A whole cloud of flies erupted from the back, prompting me to look. In the bed of the truck lay the two pulpwooders. They had been given the same treatment as H.W.

  * * *

  I tried to get in touch with the authorities, but my phone had died. Completely dead. It was the graveyard nap. Even surviving all the shit I had put it through, the phone was not impervious to the steady flow of rain. When I pressed the red button, the screen flickered miserably and then blinked off. Still, I tried to turn it on every few minutes, nervously flipping open and then closing the hinged screen so I wouldn't scream.

  Thirteenth Chapter

  I walked home in my wet clothes. I was hoarse and tired and my head hurt. With no keys, I had to finagle my way into the house through a stubborn window. I kicked my shoes into an empty corner of the living room and went straight for the shower. H.W. and the pulpwooders weren’t getting any deader.

  I dressed in a dirty old shirt and jeans and started out toward town. With no phone and no vehicle, I was left with my own two dogs to get me everywhere. However, just as I topped the hill down from the house, an elderly neighbor offered me a lift. I agreed, telling him my destination, and we rode wordlessly to town. He dropped me off and waved absently as I closed the door.

  I went up to the front door and knocked. A trim woman on the other end of middle age answered the door, made up and yet haggard all the same. We exchanged a moment of silence before she spoke. "D.L.'s in the study," Paula said, somewhat hoarsely. I smelled something sweet and familiar on her breath. Something brown and in a bottle with a name like Jack or Jim or Evan on the label. "Get you anything?"

  "No, thank you," I replied.

  "Lord, I'm hurting," she said finally, as if in explanation. She wasn’t waiting for me to heap on sympathy, not that she needed to. "This ain't supposed to happen."

  I leaned against the iron railing. "I know."

  "Parents don't bury their children. I'm burying my only daughter." It seemed to echo a statement from Janita Laveau.

  "You did the best you could, Paula."

  "Lord. Lord. Lord." She pressed her lips together so that they turned white. She swallowed, catching herself. Her stare passed through me, settling nowhere in particular, and she wiped at the corners of her eyes.

  "I wish I had come sooner," I said quietly. "You probably needed some help."

  "Nothing you could have done. Not this morning, anyway. I reckon you tried to help her, and she, well, God, I think she was just beyond being helped." She paused, shrugging. "I never smoked dope once in my life. I hadn't even had so much as a beer since she was born. Dee, well, he did some, but not really in front of her and not to an extreme. But today, I sat down and drank a whole pint of whiskey. D.L.'s, of course, since I didn't have anything of the sort in the house. I hate the way it tastes, but I drank every last drop of it."

  "Huh," I said. "Did it help?"

  She rolled her eyes. "It got me drunk. Made me sick, so sick. But it didn't help. In a way, I wanted it to pain God to see this happening to me. To us. Don't He give a good goddamn we're here in this predicament?” She paused, looking down at the floor, maybe for an answer. Then she added, “I just want to know what we did to bring this on ourselves."

  It isn't anything you did, I wanted to say, thinking maybe it was I who had cursed them. It seemed as though I was the common factor in their misery.

  But I let Paula say her piece.

  "When she got hooked on that dirty stuff, I blamed you. God help me, I did. I didn't think the two of you were right for each other. She was always a seeker, looking in the wrong places, and well, Rolson, you're just so blessed quiet. You're an enabler, and not without your problems."

  "I'm sorry," I said. "I loved her. If I could have locked her up to keep her from doing this, I would have."

  "I'm going to blame everybody for this, long as I live. I don't have reason to, but I got something lodged in my heart that's gonna keep that feeling from ever leaving me. It'll be trapped there until my dying day.” She paused again, then, straightening up, said, “Come on in. It might start raining soon."

  "I think it will," I said, and followed her in.

  The house smelled like leftovers - Paula said people had brought over all kinds of food - and she led me down the hardwood hallway to a bare, paint-chipped door. Our feet echoed in the house, as quiet as the graveyard had been. She paused just outside and put her hands on her hips, sniffing once and then running hair behind her ear with one finger. I looked down.

  “The viewing will be tomorrow night, the funeral the next morning at eleven.”

  I said that I would be there.

  "Go on in," she said. "Nothing to be afraid of, except he's worse off than I am."

  D.L. was sitting in a leather chair behind his desk, eyes half-closed, smoking the most pungent cigar I've ever encountered, clutching a half-empty bottle of J&B. Through the nebulous haze of smoke, I saw that he was both drunk and distraught, but he straightened up somewhat as I approached him.

  “I should have come earlier,” I said again, but D.L. waved off the idea without responding. He’d leveled his focus on the scotch glass for now.

  I didn’t know quite how to proceed, to push the conversation forward, so I shared in a mutual silence with him. I sat in the chair across the desk and waited, and in turn he sat quietly in the darkness of his office, feeding off the silence.

  "I handed in a resignation today," he said, after a spell. "Can't do it anymore. I've got no will to protect and serve. Got no one I want to protect, save for Paula. Whole damn town could be dead, for all I care."

  A knife went through me. I thought about H.W. and the pulpers but kept my mouth shut. He seemed to be eternally out of the mood to hear bad news.

  I said, "It wasn't your fault."

  "I’m as much to blame as anybody, no matter if we raised her to avoid drugs or we pushed the dope into her lungs. She’s my daughter, and I’m responsible for her always. I should have never let her go, not even for a second.”

  I started to speak, but he quieted me with another wave of the hand. “I’m not interested in avoiding blame, Rol. I know I tried to help her, but it doesn’t feel like I did enough right now, and I don’t want to hear any different.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “Let me know when you’re ready for it.”

  “Maybe never,” he replied. “I don’t know. Pity is the damnedest thing, and when you’re wallowing in it, you don’t ever imagine yourself getting out. All feels so close, you know?”

  I nodded.

  “And so for now I just want to be drunk and stay drunk and forget that there’s anything outside of the walls of this house. Everything outside here should just disappear. Like it’s all a dream.”

  As if on cue, he swilled from
the bottle of scotch and then replaced the cap. He said, “Reality don’t work like that. We can’t just sit in here and wither away. There’s plans we got to make. Calling relatives and getting ready for the funeral, that sorta thing.”

  “I’ll help any way I can, D.L.,” I said, and he nodded this time.

  He said, “Thought I had myself ready for this moment. Lord knows I pictured it enough times. But there ain’t no right way to rehearse for death. When it comes, it’s sloppier and meaner than anybody can predict.”

  He added, “And it fucking hurts, too.”

  “But you couldn’t have picked up every junkie, everybody she could score from. By and by, it’s got to be up to her.”

  D.L. paused. He looked like he was trying to cobble the words together from a jumble of letters on his desk. “Vanessa didn’t buy from a street dealer. She didn’t self-destruct."

  That hit me as curious, and I felt an ever-growing pit in my stomach. “I don't think I follow.”

  I did, but for some reason, I wanted D.L. to tell me, as if he weren’t in enough pain himself.

  “She was killed, Rol. I don't have any proof, and I don’t know exactly how, but I’ve been working in law enforcement long enough to know the difference between an accident and a goddamn murder, and I can tell you that this was no accidental overdose.”

  “Oh,” I said. It was all I could think to say. My mind began to swim away from me. D.L. wrestled with his tears and eventually got them under control.

  “I’ve got hunches, even if they’re all I’ve got. Now, this ain’t something I could tell Vanessa’s mother, but it’s been rolling around in my head ever since I got the call.”