Family Skulls

by Luc Reid

  “Who are you?” said a girl’s voice from behind. Seth spun around and stared. The girl was about six, dressed in a little purple dress and holding a stuffed dolphin and a naked Barbie doll.

  Think, think, think.

  Seth smiled. It probably looked more like a grimace than a smile, but it was the best he could do. He squatted down in front of her. “I need you to help me. Could you do that? See, I think there’s a spider on me. I’m just going to walk over there and you have to watch me really good, to help me out, OK? Then you can tell me when you see the spider.”

  The girl’s eyes went a little foggy and she stared off past him toward the wall with the skulls. He crept toward the door, glancing nervously at the girl, but she didn’t seem to notice him. Well, of course she didn’t notice him. As far as she knew, seeing him would be helping.

  Glad he was only wearing socks, he crept down the hallway toward the door.

  “Where’d you go?” the girl called from the other room, sadly.

  “Are you calling me?” shouted a man’s voice from upstairs. Seth’s stomach went sour and he bolted outside, not even waiting to stop the screen door from slamming. Why was the girl at home if her parents were gone? Who was the man? Could it be that the people who drove off weren’t Mr. and Mrs. Larsh?

  Rocks in the driveway jabbed his feet as he went, but he didn’t stop until he was back at the fern brake, cowering out of sight. Had the man come downstairs? The door would have given Seth away for sure. He struggled to untie his shoes so that he could get them back on over his now-dirty socks, wishing he had untied them when he took them off, all the time listening for someone following. If the man from the house came after him, should he try to ride away or just run? The bike would slow him down at first, but it would be faster after he got out to the dirt road, and he didn’t want to leave any clues behind him. Not to mention that he couldn’t afford another bike if they got this one.

  When he had his shoes on and tied he scanned the house and the yard for any sign of pursuit, but there was nothing. He shoved the bike through the undergrowth to the dirt road and got on, pedaling so hard that his wheel spun in the dirt before catching hold and moving the bike forward. He looked back again: still no pursuit.

  No one was behind him, he kept telling himself, but he still kept glancing back. On the main road, about half a mile from the turnoff to the Larshes’, a police car drove past from the other direction. At the wheel, Jerry Larsh looked up at him. Seth peddled faster, waiting to hear the car slow and turn, but the sound of the motor just faded into the distance.

  Seth didn’t slow down the whole way home. He would be dead tired again that night, but he wasn’t sure he’d be able to sleep.

  Chapter 4

  The first thing Seth noticed when he got home was the stolen bike, still lying next to the garage. He pulled it around back and hid it under the blue tarp that covered the wood pile. Should he try to return it that night? Would his mom agree to drive him? A bag of beans made it possible to ask for help within the family, but it didn’t guarantee he’d get it. He had counted on asking his dad to drive him down, but with a broken leg that didn’t seem likely.

  He was about as dirty as he could get; even the insides of his sneakers were filthy because of his muddy socks. The first thing he wanted to do was take a bath and change his clothes. Then he’d have to sit and figure out what to do next, and whether it was worth risking another spying trip to the Larshes’.

  He opened the door into the kitchen to see the entire family there eating slivers of key lime pie. His mother made key lime pies that would probably have been the envy of the whole town if any of them ever survived to leave the house. And while 5:00 wasn’t an ideal time for pie, “a sliver” didn’t count. If you had enough slivers, of course, you might not have room for dinner anyway.

  Seth’s father sat on a kitchen chair, laughing through a mouthful of pie. Seeing Seth, he stopped laughing and wiped his mouth with a napkin. Everyone else turned to look.

  This was the last thing Seth needed. He wanted to get cleaned off and to try to get a hold of himself, not become the family’s topic of conversation for the evening.

  “What in the world happened you?” his mom said.

  “I went down to the river and slipped in the mud.”

  “Then what?” she demanded. “You ground it in?”

  “I’m going to take a bath,” Seth said. “How’s your leg feel, dad?”

  “Well, they hollowed it out for me, so I’m going to be able to finish this whole pie pretty much by myself.”

  Seth grinned despite himself and headed upstairs to wash up. “Save me a piece!” he shouted from the stairs.

  “Only a sliver! It’s almost dinner time!” his mother called back.

  He was halfway up the stairs when the doorbell rang. A shiver went through him. Was it Mr. Larsh? That is, Officer Larsh? Maybe he’d been caught after all, and Jerry Larsh had just been playing with him. He froze on the stairs, willing himself to go up but anxious to find out who it was. Should he go into the living room to see? It couldn’t be Mr. Larsh, could it?

  Maybe it was whoever owned that bike.

  “Seth, come down!” Grandma Neddie called. “There’s a young lady here to see you.”

  A young lady? He didn’t know any “young ladies.” He went to the opening that led from the hall to the living room and looked in. Chloe stood inside the closed front door, dressed in loose pants and a long, embroidered shirt that hung nearly to her knees. She was talking with Grandma Neddie.

  What was Chloe doing at Seth’s house? Didn’t she have any real friends?

  “Seth was telling me he has an uncle who lives around Bradford somewhere,” said Chloe

  “Bradford? No, Seth has just the one uncle, his uncle Guy. Guy lives here in the house, but I’m afraid he doesn’t come out very much.”

  Chloe looked over at Seth and smirked. “Are you sure?” she said. “Because I could have sworn he said he did. Actually, we were giving him a ride home and he ran off when we stopped near Bradford, saying he was going to go to his uncle’s.”

  That was enough for Seth. He trudged back upstairs and locked himself in the bathroom. He turned the shower on so hot it would hurt and stripped off his clothes. Chloe would leave once she figured out she wasn’t wanted.

  Ten minutes later he was clean and tired. He wrapped the towel around his waist, went out into the hall, and dumped his clothes in the hall closet hamper, even his muddy sneakers. From downstairs he could hear the clash of pots and smell onions frying. He walked into his room and shut the door to get dressed.

  “That didn’t take long,” said Chloe.

  Seth jerked his head around and saw her standing near his dressers, looking at his bridge collection. It was bad enough she was in his room, but she definitely shouldn’t be anywhere near his bridges. Over the last few years he had built four model suspension bridges from toothpicks and wooden skewers, all spanning a gap between two old dressers where he kept his clothes and tools and papers. He’d started with a replica of the Brooklyn Bridge, which hadn’t come out very good. But his later ones were OK, and they were longer, too; he’d had to angle the dressers away from each other on one end so that he’d have a longer gap.

  Seth’s mom didn’t like him building bridges, because she knew as well as he did that the curse would never let him get into college to study engineering. He’d heard that lecture from her at least a half dozen times by now, and his dad never disagreed with her.

  But Grandma Neddie encouraged Seth. When he was eight, she’d given him a second-hand diver’s watch for his birthday, a precisely-engineered, gleaming thing with separate little dials for the day and month. It was lying in the bathroom now.

  He felt stupid walking into his room wearing nothing but a towel. Grandma Neddie must have let Chloe wait in his room, probably knowing how it would embarrass him. Grandma Neddie could be sweet, but she took a dim view of lying, even when it was necessary—as it had been w
ith Chloe. What was he supposed to tell her? That his family was cursed?

  Which just proved that even though Grandma Neddie lived in a house full of cursed people, she didn’t really understand what it was like.

  He tried to ignore Chloe as he pulled clothes out of the near dresser, not paying much attention to what they were. Once the towel almost slipped, but he caught it in time. As soon as he had his clothes he headed out of the room, leaving Chloe to study his bridges some more while he went to the bathroom to dress.

  When he got back she was between the dressers, looking up at the bottoms of the bridges.

  “This one’s a little crooked,” she said, pointing at the Brooklyn Bridge.

  “What are you doing here?” Seth said.

  “Because I hate it when people lie to me, and I thought we were getting along really well up to then. So I want to know why you really ran off like that yesterday. Are you allergic to girls? Are you a werewolf who was about to transform? Maybe you have some kind of explosive diarrhea?”

  “Why is it your business?”

  “Because you lied to me. You know, this bridge is kind of cool.”

  It was his most recent, the Golden Jubilee Bridge from London, held up by a series of towers with pyramid-like clusters of hangers instead of the swooping main cable and vertical hangers that most suspension bridges had.

  “OK, here’s what really happened,” Seth said. “I’m a superhero, and my super hearing detected a crime, so I went off to change into my superhero costume.”

  “No.”

  “All right. I suddenly recognized your mother as a hired assassin who intended to kill me. She had rigged it so we would both miss the bus, and the blown tire was just a cover. It didn’t occur to me until I saw the outline of the gun in her pocket. She has a whole secret life, you know.”

  “Nice try. No.”

  “I had bad fish for lunch and really needed to throw up, but I was embarrassed for you to see me doing it.”

  “Better—but no.”

  “OK. My family is cursed, and if I had stayed, you never would have gotten a tow truck to come help. So I ran off and stole a bike to ride home on.”

  Chloe was quiet for a minute.

  “Now, don’t tell me you believe that one,” Seth said. Did she know something?

  “Well, I believe the part about you stealing the bike.”

  “But you know I was just making the curse up, obviously.” Seth wasn’t dumb enough to think that he could actually get anyone to believe in the family curse, and it made him nervous that she’d pretend to—or that there’d be some reason she might already know about it.

  Chloe didn’t answer his question, but she walked over and sat on his bed, crossing her legs Indian style. “Why do you think your family’s cursed?”

  “I said it was just a joke.”

  Chloe just stared at him expectantly. Seth took her arm and pulled her up from her bed, then escorted her out of the room as though he was a prison guard. “I think it’s time for you to leave.”

  “What? I’m just trying to get a simple answer to a simple question about something insane you did.”

  Seth brought her down the stairs and toward the living room, pulling as necessary. “Thank you for coming. Please make an appointment next time.”

  At the end of the hallway he nearly bumped into Grandma Neddie, who stood with her hands on her hips, glaring.

  “Is your friend staying for dinner?” Grandma Neddie said.

  “No,” said Seth, just as Chloe said “Sure. Thanks.”

  “One more for dinner, Dana!” Neddie called to Seth’s mom in the kitchen.

  “So Seth says the family’s cursed,” Chloe said conversationally. Seth shot her a poisonous glance. Neddie looked at Seth with some surprise.

  “He did? Seth, why would you say that?”

  “I was asking him why he ran off when our car broke down,” said Chloe. “And he was making up creative lies.”

  Neddie gave Chloe a long, level look, and Seth was satisfied to see Chloe blink and then look away. “And you want to know the truth, do you?” she asked Chloe seriously.

  “I do.”

  “Why?”

  Chloe glanced at Seth, then met Neddie’s gaze again. This time she didn’t look away. This went on for at least thirty long seconds before Neddie broke into an unexpected laugh.

  “I think we understand each other,” she said to Chloe. “Come with me, you two. I’d like to talk to you in my parlor.” She put her arm around Chloe and led her away toward the room. Not understanding what had just happened, Seth set off with them. This couldn’t be good.

  Grandma Neddie’s “parlor” was the front part of her bedroom. The bed and dresser were in the back of the room, curtained off for privacy, and in the front she had set up so much furniture from her old house that there was barely any room to move. She had a grandfather clock, a mantle clock, a cuckoo clock, a love seat, an armchair, a red-and-violet striped chaise lounge, a hassock, and an oversized, round coffee table. She urged Chloe and Seth into seats before sitting down herself, looking from one to another.

  “Before we get into this,” said Neddie. “I have one question: how did you manage to give Seth a ride home?”

  Chloe looked confused.

  “I was helping Chloe with her math,” Seth said.

  “Ah,” said Neddie. She turned her eyes on Chloe. “And then he ran off?”

  “They had a flat tire,” Seth said.

  “Ah,” said Neddie again. She studied Chloe for a moment. “Chloe, let me tell you a story about our family.”

  Seth groaned. “She barged into our house without being invited, and now you’re going to tell her the family history?”

  “Well, since it’s the Wall family and I’m not a Wall, it’s really more like gossip than family history,” said Neddie. She seemed to have perked up a little now that she knew what was going on, which made sense: nothing annoyed her more than being kept in the dark. Apparently she and Chloe had that in common.

  “This is going to explain why Seth ran off yesterday?” said Chloe.

  “No,” said Seth.

  “Yes, it will,” said Neddie. “Now, let’s go back about a hundred years. In 1898, two sawmill owners here in Caledonia, John LaPlante and Charles Benning, were feuding. Both of them wanted to run the town, and neither one seemed to realize that owning a sawmill doesn’t make you a duke. LaPlante was a Catholic, a family man, and a drinker. Benning was an Episcopalian deacon, a public detractor of marriage as an institution, and a teetotaler. They found any number of excuses to fight.

  “Well, one Sunday Benning didn’t show up to church, which was very unusual for him. They went to his house to look for him when church was over, and not only wasn’t he home, but his cows hadn’t been milked for a couple of days. The whole town turned out to search him out, and they finally found him tangled in some tree roots down river, all bloated and with his eyes eaten out by the crows—sorry about that, dear—”

  Chloe was leaning forward on the chaise lounge. She shrugged.

  “—and with three knife wounds in his chest.

  “Now, you have to understand that on Friday night LaPlante and Benning had had a loud argument that had been overheard by at least five unrelated people. So of course the first thing that happened after they found Benning’s body was that they took LaPlante down to White River Junction and threw him in jail.”

  Seth was mainly watching Chloe’s reaction, and so far it was puzzlement. He could understand: if he were in her position, he wouldn’t understand what the point was either.

  “Was LaPlante Seth’s great grandfather or something?” said Chloe.

  “Just wait,” said Neddie. “Anyway, eight days after LaPlante was brought to jail, Benning’s brother and three brothers-in-law went down to White River in the middle of the night, broke into his cell, and killed him.”

  “Now let me set that aside for a moment, so I can tell you about two other families in town you�
�ll need to know. One was the Walls, Seth’s great-great-great grandparents and their children. The other was the Larshes. Remy Larsh was a farmer and the town dowser. You know what a dowser is?”

  “Did you say ‘Larsh?’” said Chloe. Seth glanced over at her. He just caught her covering up a look of surprise with a blank expression. “Anyway, what’s a dowser? Some kind of fireman?”

  “Very funny,” said Seth.

  “A dowser is someone who, they say, can find water by walking around with a Y-shaped stick,” Grandma Neddie said. “Or by holding a pendulum over a map. Some can even tell you where people are by holding a pendulum over a map. The Walls themselves used to do some of that kind of thing, but not like the Larshes. For Remy Larsh finding water was as easy as sucking eggs. He could tell you where a sickness had come from, or find where to build your house for the best luck, or predict three weeks in advance when an early snowfall or a hailstorm was coming.”

  “Did you know him?” said Chloe.

  Grandma Neddie frowned at Chloe. “How old do you think I am? This was over a hundred years ago.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, I did not know him. I met his grandson, Chet Larsh, when I was young. Remy’s great-great grandson, Jerry Larsh, still lives in town. But the point is that Remy knew who had killed Charles Benning, and it wasn’t John LaPlante.” Neddie pointed at Seth. “It was Seth’s great-great grandfather, Henry Wall.

  “He had a good reason to kill the man, now. For some months, Benning had been harassing Henry’s sister Alice, a girl of fifteen. The day he died, Benning had tried to take advantage of the girl when he found her in the woods gathering blackberries. But Benning didn’t realize that Henry was out with her, and when Henry came upon Alice pinned to the ground, with Benning tearing her dress, Henry knocked the man over and stabbed him to death. He was only sixteen at the time, Henry.

  “Of course the family wanted to keep it quiet. Henry’s father helped him drag the body down to the river, and they tied stones on to sink it. But apparently the knots weren’t tied very tight.”

  “So what does this—” said Chloe.