Revenant Rising

by M. M. Mayle

  At the end of the hallway she tries the door to the back stairs that’s been securely nailed shut since her grandmother took the fatal plunge. The door doesn’t budge, but it does remind her of how long she’s been aware of the ill-fitting grade door into the garage without doing anything about it.

  A quick walkthrough of the main floor increases her disenchantment; every room but the kitchen is a period piece and suggestive of an exhibit at the Smithsonian. While still inviting, the dining room and front parlor cannot bear close scrutiny. Nor can the gathering room or the library. From the doorway of her father’s former study, she regards the worn furnishings and for the first time ever, accepts that he will never again sit at his desk and invent quirky ways of showing her and her siblings how much he loves them. It’s a little easier to view the shabbiness of the nearby sewing room because when her mother went away, there were no hopes to keep alive.

  On the side porch outside the kitchen, she concedes that the exterior needs work as well. In whatever direction she looks, some element is in need of repair or replacement—even the stone steps leading to the flower gardens.

  Beyond those steps, however, nothing looks like an emergency. Granted, the newly hired landscaping service won’t ever maintain the yard the way it was cared for when her mother was in charge, or even when her brothers were in charge, but in just one day a crew has achieved more than Laurel could have in a solid week.

  And that would be the point, that would be the obvious reason to hire someone to maintain the house—because she can’t do it herself and because she can’t just give up on it either. And she can’t allow the OQC Architectural Committee, ardent arbiters of good taste and stringent upkeep, to cite her for noncompliance; she owes her parents better than that.

  Laurel returns to the kitchen and prepares to leave for work. Next week she’ll initiate the search for a maintenance man. She could get in touch with Thelma Floss, the self-appointed neighborhood sentinel who should be able to produce more leads than the yellow pages when it comes to finding reliable domestic help. The widow of fifteen years has more time than ever for keeping an eye on local happenings. And she’s no stranger to the trials and tribulations of the Chandler family after having once served as their vastly underpaid babysitter. No realities need be concealed from her.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Morning, April 4, 1987

  Hoop estimates a full sixty-minute hour has gone by when happenstance meanders him along a piecemeal trail from Glen Abbey to Union, New Jersey, and Route 22. Just as well the trip took so long because if he’d got here any sooner nothing much would be open yet. He hasn’t gone far on the widely divided highway when he spots a sign for the storage unit place and another for a giant discount store that ought to have everything he intends to buy. His faith in happenstance goes way up as he closes in on the Family-Mart as his first stop.

  He parks in front—a ways away from other cars like he did at the park-and-ride lot—counting on high visibility as the best protection against thieves. Without making a big show of it, he tests the locked doors before he walks casual-like away from the Jimmy—like he wasn’t turning his back on the kind of luck that could go either way.

  Inside the store, he takes a cart and picks out clothes first because that’s the first department he comes to. He finds everything he saw worn by the commoners in New York except shoes. They’re in another department and when he gets there they don’t have any marked “Adidas,” so he makes do with a pair of look-alikes.

  The coffee maker he wants is not far from the plastic storage bins and boxes he’s looking for; the padlocks and tool case he’s after are right next to the garden department where stacks of garbage cans make him think about replacing the paint bucket if he happens across something with a better seal. The large-size gym bag he needs is in sporting goods. After that he doubles back to the food aisles where he resists Pop-Tarts and M&Ms and takes only canned coffee and related supplies.

  He nearly forgets to buy a watch—he’d rather do without—but he has to have one now that he’s in the land of clock-watchers.

  At the checkout, he forks over hard-earned cash he intended to ration out in amounts a lot smaller than today’s total and again reminds himself he no longer has to be quite so tightfisted.

  Down the road a ways, the self-storage yard agrees with everything said in the advertisement. On a quick tour of the place he’s shown a fully fenced facility with gated access by entry code. Each unit has it’s own entry code and alarm against break-ins, and the whole shebang is watched over twenty-four hours a day by manned security cameras. The only thing wrong with the setup is the size of the one unit available for rent today; it’s the largest they have, making it a hundred times larger than he needs or wants to pay for.

  He nevertheless shells out—again, with earned money—and signs a deal good for ninety days with an option to renew, whatever that means.

  After he’s left alone to take possession of the rented space, he quick unloads the Jimmy. Then he tests the workings of the garage-size overhead door a few times and leaves it down while transferring the contents of his heavy old tool chest into a smaller one that weighs half as much.

  Although the light from the low-wattage ceiling bulb is dim, he can see well enough to shift the Cliff Grant stuff from garbage bags to stout file boxes that accept everything but the rotating directory. The directory he puts in a large plastic bin along with the ledgers taken from Gibby Lester’s place. There’s room in that bin for the leaking package of dope once it’s been stuffed into a smaller bin with a snap-on lid. The money fills up three plastic shoeboxes that get stacked inside their own large bin leaving only his personal belongings and Audrey without fresh packaging.

  He can’t look at the beat-up bucket right now; he can’t think about that failure or he’ll hit bottom and stay there. Bad enough that he’s getting ready to leave her in a strange place even though it’s probably as safe a place as she’s ever been left.

  Mindful of the loose bail on the bucket and with as little jostling as possible, Hoop moves her to the far back corner of the space. He piles the other containers around her in a makeshift barricade, then busies himself filling the new gym bag with clothes bought today and the few items still rattling around in the old grocery sack that’s served as valise till now.

  From the bottom of the sack, he dredges up the things taken from the rock star’s Los Angeles hotel room. With his mind wanting to stay filled with the Audrey disaster, he can’t think of a logical place to put the pocket photo album and the medicine packets, so he drops them in the gym bag to be puzzled over another time.

  The discards—the cardboard shoeboxes, canvas satchels, rusted tool chest, and tattered garbage bags—he piles together in the other far corner like he’s trying to make the place look lived in. The new things—the gym bag, tool case, coffee maker and supplies—he gathers together to take with him.

  His hand is on the door handle when he remembers he didn’t hold back any of the cash supply. For emergencies, he tells himself when he cracks open bin and box and grabs a thick wad of bills. This he stashes in the tool case that’s been outfitted with one of the locks bought earlier.

  Outside, he reprograms and sets the alarm the way the rental guy showed him. He taps a code into a wall-mounted set of keypads that reminds him of one of those movable number games sold at novelty stores and strikes him as just as flimsy. The security device he’ll most depend on is the other padlock he bought—the heavy-duty one said to stand up to gunfire and hacksaws. He fits it through a hasp that wouldn’t be there if the people running this place put any great store by electronic devices.

  Satisfied that he’s done the best he can, he stows the reduced load in the back of the Jimmy and drives away in fairly high spirits. All he’s worried about now is if the ad for the rust and dent-free maroon-and-silver 1985 El Camino Conquista with 4.3 V6 fuel- injected engine, power steering, power brakes, three-speed automatic transmission, AM and FM stereo, cold air
, tilt wheel, and factory rally wheels is going to burn a hole in his pocket.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Morning, April 4, 1987

  With the kitchen now set to rights and the laundry started, Laurel goes back up stairs to dress at nine-thirty, fifteen minutes ahead of schedule.

  After gathering her hair into a loose coil and applying a little extra makeup, she puts on flimsy flesh-colored undergarments and nude pantyhose. Next she slips into an ivory silk charmeuse blouse and a black wool crêpe dressmaker suit. In adjusting the surplice bodice of the blouse to limn the lapel line of the suit jacket, she necessarily reveals an inch or so of cleavage. To screen that gap, she adds a matinee-length strand of faux baroque pearls and finishes up with small diamond stud earrings and her usual wristwatch.

  The shoes selected are the same ones she wore to breakfast with David at the beginning of the week, the ones with the too-high heels she shouldn’t wear for driving or for walking any distance. She carries them when she goes down the main stairs, acknowledging that the banister really is wobbly and the beautiful Persian stair runner really does have holes in it.

  After backing out of the garage, she gives the door opener a ten-count pause before reversing it. This new precaution may take a while to become habit, and it won’t take much to make her forget about it. With so many other fresh advisories on her plate, it’s a wonder she remembered it now.

  She backs the rest of the way out of the driveway on full alert. If there were any fuckbag photographers or overprotective rock stars lurking out here last night, there’s no sign of them now, she observes as she rounds the landscaped center island of the cul-de- sac and moves toward the open end of the street. Partway there, a female figure suddenly steps into the roadway, waving her arms and startling Laurel no less than would have a fuckbag photographer or a rock star.

  “Shit!” she mutters, hits the brakes hard, and lowers the window on the passenger side. “Is something wrong, do you need help?” she shouts as the spry elderly woman fast approaches.

  “Hoo-hoo, Laurel dear!” the woman cries out. “I thought that was you in that new station wagon of yours.”

  Mrs. Floss, the neighborhood busybody, bustles over to the open window as though leaping out at passing motorists is standard procedure. “My, my,” she says, giving the Range Rover the once-over, “it’s certainly different from the ones we zipped around in my day, but I suppose everything has to change, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, indeed . . . change would seem to be the topic of the day,” Laurel replies with wasted irony.

  “Then you must know about that entire ruckus yesterday and the changes they made to the covenants.” Mrs. Floss sticks her head through the window opening.

  “Who made changes to what covenants?” Laurel frowns.

  “Oh dear, I was hoping you’d know, you being the lawyer and all.”

  “Were you watching for me just now . . . Am I to understand you’ve been waiting for me to go by?”

  “I couldn’t think of any other way to get your attention, darling. I knew you were home—I saw your lights on very early this morning—but I didn’t want to disturb your studying or wake the baby by calling.”

  She cannot have said that; the baby hasn’t been a baby in almost two decades, and rigid study hours haven’t been observed in the Chandler household in recent memory.

  Laurel casts a worried glance at the dear lady, half expecting to see that, like the Chandler dwelling, Mrs. Floss’s façade has begun to crack and peel when no one was paying attention.

  “Look, I have a minute or two, why don’t you get in the car where I can hear you better?” Laurel says.

  “I’d love to have a ride in your new car, but I’m brewing another fresh pot of coffee and I’m making another batch of those blintzes you used to enjoy so much.” Mrs. Floss cocks her head to one side. “If you can’t spare more than a minute or two . . . I’ll try to understand.” Mrs. Floss’s lower lip doesn’t actually quiver, but the effect is there.

  Good lord, when did this woman become such a manipulator? Has she always been this way? “Hop in, we’ll ride to your house together,” Laurel says, resigning herself to a tolerable fate and hoping that there might be opportunity for a tradeoff.

  The blintzes and coffee are better than remembered. The covenants in question have to do with care and maintenance of the common areas of Old Quarry Court; the changes proposed have already been voted on and ratified, something Laurel would have known if she’d bothered to read her own copy of the OQC association newsletter.

  “So you see,” she interprets for Mrs. Floss, “no changes will be made to the service per se—as it stands—but the vendor—the service provider—has petitioned for and gained the right to subcontract the job—delegate to another—at the sole discretion of the vendor and as deemed necessary. Is that clear?”

  “Oh it’s clear all right. The Edelweiss Nursery people have been serving us well for years, and suddenly they’re too big for their britches, consumed with greed, and intent on using cheap temporary labor of the sort they sent here yesterday to start the spring cleanup. Why, you should have seen them! Gypsies, tramps, and thieves!”

  She must be kidding. Since when does conservative old Mrs. Floss quote pop music?

  “Riffraff and vagrants working right next to my house where they could see in my windows and pick out what they’re coming back to steal,” Mrs. Floss shrills. “Out-of-towners, foreigners too.” Her voice drops an octave to a conspiratorial tone. “And you know what they say about the dark-skinned foreigners,” she finishes sotto voce.

  From a rant to a stage whisper in a matter of seconds. Laurel recognizes this shift as an early symptom of her father’s affliction and responds to the agitated old lady the way she learned to respond to him whenever he went to extremes—by giving weight without argument to whatever madness he held true. “No, I don’t, please tell me what they say about the dark-skinned foreigners, Mrs. Floss.”

  “You can call me Thelma, dear . . . You’ve been grown up for a long time now.” She produces a tinkle of laughter. “Now that I think about it, you’ve always been grownup, haven’t you? How are the children doing? How is your father getting along?”

  Laurel has her mouth open to give answers tailored to what Mrs. Floss appears to believe—that everyone in question still lives at home—but is interrupted before the fiction can be spoken.

  “Let’s see, Benjamin the younger is in grad school at Yale, Michael is an undergraduate there, and our dear baby Emily is completing her first year at University of New Haven, if I remember correctly.”

  Laurel is dumbfounded because Mrs. Floss has indeed remembered correctly and goes on to describe the condition of the elder Benjamin Chandler as well as anyone can.

  “Alzheimer’s . . . such a pity . . . fate worse than death,” Mrs. Floss delivers the universal opinion and could be lamenting her own fate because inconsistency is another symptom Laurel is all too familiar with.

  “On the way here you said there was something you wanted to ask me,” Mrs. Floss says as Laurel prepares to leave.

  While the window between lucidity and lunacy seems to be open, Laurel debates asking for the recommendation needed and holds off because reference to yard maintenance set the old dear off earlier and a reference to household maintenance might do the same.

  “Nothing important,” Laurel says. “It’ll keep.”

  “Please go ahead, dear, you know you can ask me anything.”

  “Well,” Laurel begins. What can be the harm, why deny the woman the illusion she’s being helpful? “I was wondering if you could recommend a good repairman or a service that provides general home maintenance and I’m afraid that might not be a good idea in light of . . . ah . . . recent developments.”

  “Oh pshaw, don’t be put off by those Edelweiss people. That too shall pass. They’ll come around to my way of thinking in no time. I’ve already explained the rules to one of them this morning, and yesterday I scatted one out of her
e that was acting as though temporary work included squatter’s rights. But don’t you worry about a thing, Laurel, dear. I’ll be calling them all by name before that grass of yours grows another inch. You do know you were absolutely right to finally sign on for lawn service, don’t you? And you do know finding a good home handyman may take a while, don’t you? Just leave it to me, though. I am so delighted you’re letting me be of use.”

  Could there be a more vivid reminder that sometimes by accepting, one is also giving? Laurel kisses her on both flushed cheeks and almost makes it to the door.

  “Hold on.” Mrs. Floss thrusts a plastic container and a jar of preserves at her. “Take the rest of the blintzes for your papa and the little boys. Milty’s already had his fill,” she says of her late spouse, “and the gardener had all he wanted,” she says of a probable figment of her imagination.

  “Thank you . . . Thelma, you’re very sweet to think of them.” Laurel takes the food she has no use for, and this time makes it all the way to the sidewalk before Mrs. Floss has something else to say.

  “If I see anyone looking in your windows again I promise to phone even if I do wake the baby and interfere with your studying,” the befuddled woman calls from her front steps. “Go along now, I have to get back to my painting. I don’t have that many years left, you know, but I never let myself forget that Whistler’s mother was no spring chicken when she took up palette and brush, and look what happened to her!” Mrs. Floss gives gleeful notice and disappears into the house.

  Laurel doesn’t drive off right away. She can’t—at least not while still in the backwash of more information and misinformation than anyone should have to deal with this early in the day. When she does put the car in gear, household maintenance is the last thing on her mind.