Table of Contents
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Chapters
OLD TEETH, Chapter 1
THE GREAT BLOOM, Chapter 2
THE JULIET, Chapter 3
ROCK AND ROLL, Chapter 4
THE MYSTERY HOUSE, Chapter 5
JOSHUA TREE, Chapter 6
LILY JOY, Chapter 7
GHOSTS, Chapter 8
THE OPERA HOUSE, Chapter 9
THIEF, Chapter 10
THE MAYOR, Chapter 11
THE COUNTY MAN, Chapter 12
LAST WORDS, Chapter 13
About the Author
Pandamoon Publishing
The Juliet
a novel
by Laura Ellen Scott
© 2016 by Laura Ellen Scott
This book is a work of creative fiction that uses actual publicly known history, events, situations, and locations as background for the storyline with fictional embellishments as creative license allows. Although the publisher has made every effort to ensure the grammatical integrity of this book was correct at press time, the publisher does not assume and hereby disclaims any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause. At Pandamoon, we take great pride in producing quality works that accurately reflect the voice of the author. All the words are the author’s alone.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pandamoon Publishing. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
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Jacket design and illustrations © Pandamoon Publishing
Art direction by Matthew Kramer, Pandamoon Publishing
Illustrations by Laura Ramm and Fletcher Kinnear, Pandamoon Publishing
Editing by Zara Kramer, Rachel Schoenbauer, Saren Richardson, and Jessica Reino, Pandamoon Publishing
Pandamoon Publishing and the portrayal of a panda and a moon are registered trademarks of Pandamoon Publishing.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC
Edition: 1
Dedication
Dedicated to my Mom, who loves the National Gem Collection but doesn’t give a shit about the Hope Diamond.
Also dedicated to the memory of Alan Cheuse, who taught me that when someone says they’re confused, they’re lying.
Special thanks to Debra Lattanzi-Shutika, Erin Fitzgerald, Steve Himmer, Danny Collier, Lucy Jilka, Tara Laskowski, Art Taylor, Dusty Cake, Jen Michalski, everyone at One More Page Books, the Beatty Museum & Historical Society, and all the Pandas at Pandamoon Publishing, especially Zara Moore Kramer, who is the cure for writer’s block.
And of course, nothing is possible without Dean Taciuch.
The Juliet
OLD TEETH
Chapter 1
June 1984: Centenary, Nevada
The man with the old teeth knew he was being watched. Ghost towns were never as lonely as promised. He hung a lit lantern over the card table where he ate his meals and moved slowly through the ancient stucco shack like a dancer. He knew there was a boy out there crouched on a flat rock not far from the window, watching him. It was a dangerous perch, but there were so many things young people were brave about in the nighttime. The rock was balanced on the side of the foothill behind the shack; it had pounded down in a slide a month ago, landing atop smaller rocks that had only come down within the last year. The desert was made for fools.
The man moved from the window and left only the view of the lantern, the table, and the Hustler centerfold he’d tacked to the north wall. He dressed for work. It was almost tomorrow.
In one mood he put on his uniform and boots, and in another more reverent mood he pulled on the greenstone belt. He picked up his dog’s blanket and draped it across his shoulders. The dog disappeared years ago. The cat was still around here, somewhere. The man with the old teeth grabbed his walking stick.
Now for his young watcher. Sometimes it was best to look indirectly at a shadow, just as you do with certain stars. When he looked sideways through the window he saw that the boy was actually a man, still and solid with powerful, bare shoulders. A robber, a killer, an arsonist? The man inside the cottage didn’t much care. He had found his greenstone and he was done with the rest. The best part of growing old was that the many fears he’d suffered in his life had finally distilled into a singular blind abstraction called death, the thought of which was more tiresome than terrifying.
The young man on the rock had all his fears ahead of him though. Years of fears.
It was time to make some noise.
The old man went to the front door that faced a canyon road made mostly impassable from the recent rockfall. There was a footpath through it, one only he could see. The valley was crumbling all around, reshaping itself again and coughing up boulders that threatened to bury him. He kept a section of plastic marine pipe by the front door. He carried it outside and placed it over his mouth like a megaphone.
The old man called through the pipe once and let sound bounce among the rocks. It was supposed to be a birdcall, but over the years the impression had evolved into a scream, feminized and brutal, with a clipped finish—the cry cut short. A whole story in a noise.
He went back inside to check on his watcher. The man on the rock was gone, scared off. Finally, the work of the night could begin.
* * *
It was midnight, and Lily Joy’s gravesite was lit with candles. The glow gave away its hiding place behind a hardened dune of rubble. Rhys Nash brought a bottle of Jameson with him that cost eleven of the fifteen bucks he had left in the world, but since he’d be on a plane back to the UK tomorrow, the cost didn’t matter.
The Joy vigil had already begun with a couple of party guys and three girls in anachronistic hippie dresses, all laughing at the slightest provocation and gulping wine from a jug. Rhys liked his chances. It didn’t matter that he was cartoon skinny with a nose like a hatchet; for the first time in his life, he was turning heads. He had the hair, now down to the middle of his back, and he had the accent. This was his first trip to America, and he’d backpacked from desert to sea and back again over a period of three months, letting his hair grow to further distinguish himself from the American boys who were trying to look British, all poofed up like the singers they saw on MTV. And he drank whiskey, the good stuff. Or at least he carried it with him. He couldn’t miss.
Rhys walked shyly into the candlelight. The grave was protected by a chicken-wire fence that didn’t keep anyone out. A long-haired girl in a peasant skirt and bikini top crouched on the mound in the middle to light a series of votive candles she’d arranged into a heart shape. A couple of guys with gelled hair and designer jeans stood outside the fence to offer her advice. Along with the candles, the mound was littered with trinkets and tributes—shoes, beads, empty bottles, feather boas, cat-eye masks—stuff that prostitutes liked, apparently. From what little information Nash had acquired, it would appear that while she was living, Ms. Joy was one of the demimonde.
Rhys and his bottle were received warmly. He took the first swig before passing it on to his new friends. “To Lily Joy,” he said. He leaned forward to squint at the letters stenciled on the plain wooden cross that was planted at one end of the grave. He added, “AKA Becky Akins.” The name Lily Joy had been printed on the horizontal bar and Becky Akins on the vertical. Where the names
intersected, they shared the Y.
When Rhys spoke, the girl on the mound noticed, and she smiled at him as if he were a rock star. He could tell she was holding in the question, mulling a strategy. The Americans he didn’t want to talk to always asked where he was from, while the more interesting ones liked to figure it out for themselves.
She kept her eyes on his as she gathered her skirt to climb back over the chicken wire. The heart of tiny candles blazed next to her sandaled feet. One of the Gel Boys reached across to give her a hand. When she made it back to the side of the living, she angled towards Rhys to accept a swig of whiskey.
“How’d you hear about poor Lily?” she asked, as if the site was some sort of American secret.
Rhys shrugged. “Back in town. It’s my last night in the States. I thought I’d do something a little unusual.”
“You know the legend?”
“It looks like the lady was popular.” Rhys knew some of the details and guessed at others. A woman with two names, buried on her own behind the jail in a grave decked out like a rubbish bin in carnival season. There had to be a whore with a heart o’ gold deep under that mound.
“Not with the Good Women of Centenary,” the girl said. “Lily was shot by her pimp. Four times in the back. They were carrying her to the cemetery.” Here the girl raised her arm and pointed her finger into darkness over Rhys’s shoulder.
“But the Good Women wouldn’t have it?”
“No, they wouldn’t. So the men buried her here. She was only twenty-one.” The girl looked down to the candles. “I’m twenty-one,” she said, as if her birthday had just happened in that instant.
Rhys resisted the urge to say you better be careful then. His smart-ass tendencies had left him lonely on many a night on his American journey. He considered Lily Joy, and what passed for legend in the US. The woman had been dead for a mere 80 years, and she was best remembered for a bit of garden-variety post-mortem humiliation. Back home that would just be Act One, and the audience would be hollering for the players to get on with it. Bring on the ghosts already, before we miss last call.
The girl said, “A real tragedy.”
“Sad story to be sure.”
The girl stood a little closer. He could smell coconut on her hair. Someone gave out a shout in the distance, but no one cared. It was just lovers playing grab-ass over by the opera house. The girl caught the bottle of whiskey again and held onto it, sharing only with Rhys, who thought the whole business was going very well.
Someone climbed up from the bottom of the slope, almost materializing from the base of the bluff. Rhys reacted with a twitch as he recognized the sound of boots on rubble. Boots came with authority, law enforcement or military, the kind that was skeptical of non-Americans. He relaxed when he saw a long-haired shadow preceded by the perfume of marijuana. The guy was big, a Native American, in fatigues and a dark tank top that showed his muscles.
He looked Rhys hard in the eyes and made a decision. “Larry, we gotta go.” He seemed to be talking to the girl. Larry? The guy handed a nearly spent joint to one of the Gel Boys.
The girl was annoyed. She turned to Rhys and explained, “Larissa. Tony thinks he’s funny.”
Tony was reading Rhys. “What is that accent. You Irish.” His tone wouldn’t allow for normal inflection, as if questions were unmanly.
“Welsh, actually.”
Larissa grinned. Tony guessed wrong. “I’m not ready to leave,” she said and nodded towards the candles on Lily Joy’s grave.
Tony wasn’t going to fight with her, but he wasn’t going to leave her alone with Rhys, either. Everyone understood that.
A temporary setback, then. Larissa liked Rhys enough to stick by him, but she was obviously off limits. The other two women were getting drunk and high with the fancy boys, and Rhys was going to have to work fast to peel one off for himself. And there was Tony, fixing him in place with a snap-neck stare.
“This is girl’s stuff.” Tony meant the grave. Larissa shushed him, but he ignored her. “I just hiked up to The Mystery House.”
Rhys asked, “What, like in the song?”
“You think it’s a joke, but it isn’t. Mystery House is real.”
One of the drunk girls started to sing: “Ride your mystery horse to The Mystery House, and…something, something.” It was a sugar-sweet song with a dark history relating to the singer’s connections to Satanism, so it appealed to almost everyone.
Rhys flashed a grin at her. “Your hippie mum sing you that one in the cradle?” She laughed, and he knew he needed to get over there. She was a redhead, plenty of those back home, but he couldn’t be picky.
Rhys handed the whiskey to Tony who took the offering as an invitation to lecture. “The Mystery House was built the same time as all this other shit, but it’s literally on the outskirts. Like, almost a quarter mile around this rock, tucked up a canyon road that goes nowhere. Not anymore.”
Larissa was annoyed. “You’re ruining it. You’re spoiling the magic.”
“I’m tired of magic. I grew up with it.” He gestured with the bottle. “What about you, Welshman? You grew up with magic too, right? Spooks and goblins in the bog and all that.”
“A fair amount, yes.”
“You religious now?”
“Not at all.”
“See?” Tony was speaking to Larissa. “Your folks screwed you over, raising you atheist. Now you’re always looking for stuff that isn’t there.”
Larissa rolled her eyes. “Installment number 97 of the Never-Ending Argument.”
“Not this shit again.” One Gel Boy nudged the other, who seemed to agree that they could find something more interesting to do than listen to their friends bicker. They rose together and wandered away from the party, disappearing in the starlit ruins.
Rhys took the opportunity of their departure to slide closer to the redhead and her dark-haired friend. He retrieved the whiskey and made sure the redhead got another taste while Tony and Larissa distracted each other. He guessed they were married or something, and not for long, either in the past or the future.
Rhys asked, “And it’s called The Mystery House because of its location?”
Larissa had given in by now. She was no longer having fun with her mystic dream. She took the bottle back and raised it in a sarcastic toast. “To Centenary. Civilization at its swiftest and aspirational best.”
“I’m not sure I follow,” Rhys said.
“Look,” said Larissa. “Top to bottom, highest to lowest. It’s not even symbolic or ironic. It’s just raw.”
Tony concentrated on rolling another joint, but he couldn’t resist shooting a professorial look at Rhys. “She means the layout of Centenary. The banks and the opera house up on the edge of the basin, and everything getting shittier and shittier till you get down here behind the jailhouse and the red-light district.”
“With Lily Joy behind the garbage,” Larissa said. “And that only looks like the bitter end.”
Rhys said, “Until you find The Mystery House.”
“Right,” Tony said. “So who would be more of an outcast than The Whore of Centenary? The place is well built, dug in if you will. Like it was a choice but not a choice, you know?”
“Not even a century ago,” Larissa said. Her speech was slurring a little, but she was focused on an ancient and persistent wrong. “There are deeds and records for every stick, brick, and pit in Centenary, except that house. It’s on the maps but never identified.”
Rhys giggled. Larissa glared at him.
“Sorry,” he said. “Back home that’s where the witch lives.”
Tony liked that. Larissa thought Rhys was poking fun at her.
Tony said, “Could be the case here as well, except we have more diversity to consider. I’m thinking it was where Timbisha Shoshone workers, my people, might have been quartered. Or maybe Blacks. For cheap labor. But Witches, Indians, Niggers, it’s all the same, right?”
; “And you went back there tonight?”
“There’s an old dude living in the house now. I saw him standing at the window.”
“Who would live out here?”
“I would,” said the redhead’s girlfriend. She was young, maybe young-young, and she hadn’t spoken a word all night. Black hair and a blue skirt with a loose, white blouse showing off country girl flesh. The redhead giggled, told her to shut up. Maybe a little sis, but not so little. Tony and Larissa seemed to make a point of ignoring her.
Tony said, “Might be a squatter. You get a lot of ‘em in these ghost towns. The house is actually on private land. The real owner is some environmental activist who lost his steam or got bored. He abandoned the house after a rockfall closed the canyon road on the park side. Used to be a lot more accessible.”
The girl in the blue skirt sort of faded away. Rhys had been marginally aware of her, and then he noticed she was gone. Wandered after the Gel Boys, perhaps. He hoped she wasn’t upset at how she’d been shot down, but he wasn’t going to let her distract him from the more pressing goal of getting somewhere with her redheaded companion. Rhys learned that the redhead’s name was Ginger, after all. The night had started with great promise, but now it seemed so unimaginative. Still, Ginger was from Louisiana, and that was pretty exotic.
“You eat alligators?” he asked.
She winked at him. Rhys didn’t think he’d ever been winked at by a woman before. He had an old uncle in Swansea with alarming eyebrows who winked all the time, but the poor fellow couldn’t help it.
Rhys winked back, and Ginger laughed so hard she almost stumbled, giving Rhys an excuse to snake his arm around her back.
Larissa said she wished they had her Ouija board.
“My granny called it a planchette,” Rhys said.
The Juliet Page 1