by Karen Hall
The clock said 3:16. He should probably try to get some sleep, even if it meant risking the dreams. When he lost sleep he just got more depressed, and he needed to keep his head as clear as possible to deal with whatever the hell was going on.
He reached over to turn off the lamp and saw that the red message light was blinking on his answering machine. He thought for sure he’d checked it when he came in, but he must not have. He debated leaving it till morning, since he knew it was Rick with Monday’s work schedule. But every once in a while Rick found weekend work for him, and the idea of having something to do tomorrow appealed to him. Anything to keep his mind off his encroaching insanity. He hit the Play button.
For a few seconds there was only static, and Jack had decided it was a hang up and got up to reset the machine when he heard the voice. “ . . . Jack . . . you have to get help . . .” The line crackled for another second, then the voice returned. “She was telling you the truth . . .” Jack felt his legs give way and he collapsed onto the chair. More static, replaced by a dial tone, then the machine’s robot voice: “End of messages.” He reached for the machine. His hand was shaking so hard it was all he could do to rewind the message. He heard the static again and waited. It went on and on, long after the message should have started. The dial tone cut it off again. “End of messages.”
Jack rewound the tape again and hit the Play button. The machine beeped at him. “End of messages.”
He pulled the tape out and made sure it had rewound all the way. It had. He snapped it back into the machine and pressed the button, hard, as if that would help. “End of messages,” the machine insisted.
Nothing. There’s nothing on the damned tape!
Jack put his face in his hands and tried to breathe. His eyes were welling up and his throat had closed so tightly it made his chest hurt. The voice was still echoing in his head. He hadn’t heard it for a long time, but he knew it well.
It was Tallen.
SEVEN
Randa stared at Tillie’s breakfast menu through unfocused eyes, the result of a hangover that rivaled anything she’d ever done to herself at a freshman mixer, and tried to remember why it had seemed like a good idea to stay and have two and a half more drinks last night after Jack had stormed out.
Could it possibly be because you apparently had an in-depth conversation with a ghost?
I did not have a conversation with a ghost. There are a million logical explanations.
Name one.
Maybe it was someone pretending to be Ryland. Cam had a respectable amount of money and, as far as anyone knew, no locatable next of kin.
The man you saw was the man in Cam’s scrapbook, and you know it.
Maybe Ryland isn’t really dead. Maybe Jack lied.
Why would he lie?
Well, Cam seems to have lied to me all over the place. Maybe they’re a family of pathological liars. They’re certainly a family of pathological somethings.
The breakfast crowd had not paid her a lot of attention, with the exception of the occasional scowl she was getting from the little old woman who owned the guesthouse she had checked into upon discovering she was too drunk to drive to Atlanta.
She looked out the window and was just beginning to worry about the possibility of Jack showing up when she saw him, a blur of old denim, making his way up the highway, his hands in his pockets. He was walking briskly, as if he was late for an appointment. Barely checking for traffic, he half ran across the road. He came through the door and headed straight for her booth, sliding into the seat across from her like she’d been waiting for him.
“I called every hotel in town looking for you.” This was a long way from what she’d expected; it took a Herculean effort to conceal that fact.
“Why?”
“I want to talk to you.”
“You could have fooled me last night.”
“Will you just hear me out?”
“Why, certainly. You were so patient with me, the least I can do is return the favor.”
“Let me know when you’ve gotten all this out of your system,” he said without emotion. He was untouchable behind the fortress of that blank expression, and he knew it. She wanted to kick him.
“Okay,” she said. “What is it?”
“I need to know the truth.”
“About what?”
“What you said, about talking to Ryland. I have to know if that really happened.”
“How could it have happened? You said Ryland’s been dead for years.”
“Forget that. Let me worry about it.”
The redheaded waitress appeared, Bic poised above her guest check.
“What can I get y’all?”
“Coffee. Black,” Randa answered mechanically.
“Two,” Jack added.
The waitress pocketed the guest check, took Randa’s menu (while giving her a stern once-over), and was gone.
“The guy who said he was Ryland. Where did you see him?”
“Cam’s living room. He said I should find you and give you the books. I asked him why he couldn’t do it himself. He said he couldn’t get through your thick skull.” She paused for effect, then added, “Whatever could he have meant by that?”
Jack remained stoic. “So what was it that a total stranger was supposed to be able to get through my thick skull?”
“He seemed to think you were in some kind of trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“I don’t know. He wasn’t making a lot of sense. But then, the poor guy’s been dead for three years; I guess I shouldn’t pick on his syntax.”
The waitress returned with two mugs of coffee.
“Are y’all sure you don’t want breakfast?” It was aimed at Jack. Randa had a sneaking suspicion the girl had a greater interest in eavesdropping on their conversation than any genuine concern over Jack’s nutritional needs. He looked at her, annoyed.
“Hadn’t you better stop talking to me, before you get Darlene all upset again?”
Her face turned sheepish, so Randa assumed Jack had hit a nerve. Whatever he’d done, it had worked. She was gone. Jack turned back to Randa.
“How can I know?” he asked.
“Know what?”
“That you’re not just trying to trick me into something.”
“Oh, come on. Are we going to do that one again?” It came out louder than she’d meant it to, and Randa was drawing stares, but she was too annoyed to care. “Look, if I wanted to write some tabloid exposé on your sacred family, I would have done it a long time ago and I wouldn’t have needed you. Cam’s followers will have a new messiah by the time I get home, so a story about his childhood wouldn’t even be an easy sell, much less a hot property. And in case you haven’t noticed, this country has been executing people at far too rapid a rate for anyone to give a damn about Tallen anymore. So if I’m trying to trick you into a story, you tell me what the hell story I’m trying to trick you into.”
He was quiet for a long moment, staring into his coffee. When he finally spoke, he didn’t look up. “Then why are you here?”
“I don’t know. The man who said he was Ryland told me that I’d do this if I cared anything about your family.”
“Why do you care about my family?”
“Apparently I have a pathological obsession with them, if you want the unsolicited opinion of your late brother’s most recent girlfriend.”
He looked at her, startled out of his shell. “I thought you were . . . I mean, I assumed . . .”
Randa shook her head. “Nope. My stint as Playmate of the Year was cut down in its prime by one Nora Dixon, formerly my closest and most trustworthy friend.”
“Cam ditched you for your best friend?” He seemed mildly amused by that.
“Well, from what I heard, Nora wasn’t exactly a passive participant. And I’m the idiot who introduced them, so it’s hard to come up with a blameless party in the mix.” She didn’t know why she was telling him any of this. It was none of his
damned business. “I don’t have an answer. My current theory is that I was very bad in another lifetime, and for punishment, God has made me obsess over your family.”
He smiled. He actually smiled. It took years off his face, and the hardness was replaced by something close to warmth.
“Well, whatever you did, I must have done something worse. At least you didn’t have to grow up with them.”
He sounded like Cam when he said it, down to the tiniest inflection. It made Randa wince. She was grateful when he didn’t seem to notice.
“I don’t get it. If Ryland’s still alive, why wouldn’t he just come to me?” The smile was gone as quickly as it had appeared.
“Is it possible that Ryland’s still alive?”
“I guess so, technically. I didn’t go to the funeral. Mainly because he’d been dead for a year before my aunt bothered to tell me.”
“Why would she tell you he was dead if it wasn’t true?”
“I don’t know.” He sipped his coffee and stared out the window. “Nothing in my life has ever made sense.” He hesitated, then looked back at her.
“The reason I wanted to talk to you”—he paused and took a breath—“I know how crazy this sounds, but last night when I got home, there was a message on my answering machine from Tallen.”
Randa stared at him, waiting for him to explain. He didn’t. “You’re serious?” she finally asked.
“It’s not something I’d joke about.”
Randa remembered Cam’s claim that he’d seen Tallen, and she had to work to suppress a shudder. “Are you sure it was Tallen?” she asked.
“It was Tallen’s voice,” he said. “You probably wouldn’t have any trouble convincing me that I’m losing my mind, but I know Tallen’s voice.” He choked on the words and stopped, stared down into his coffee cup. “It was him,” he said, quietly, to no one.
“Well . . . did he . . .”
Did he what, Randa? Leave a number where he could be reached?
She tried again. “What did the message say?”
“That you were telling me the truth.”
So his ghost believed that she saw her ghost. That helped.
“Do you still have the tape?”
“There’s nothing on it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I rewound it, and there’s nothing on it,” he said. “Look, it’s probably just—my mother was batshit crazy when she died. My father was not even human, and Tallen had to have been at least temporarily insane to do what he did, I don’t care what the jury said. And if even Cam could lose it, there’s no reason to think I’m somehow exempt.” He sighed. “I’ve been coming unglued lately. I’ve been having these migraines, one right after another. It keeps me disoriented. And these dreams . . . I can’t even describe them. They’re unreal. I mean, even for dreams. It’s like . . .” He groped for a word.
“Like you’re going somewhere in your sleep?”
His face tensed with disbelief and went ashen. “How do you know?” he asked in a tight whisper.
“Cam was having weird dreams, too. That’s how he described them to someone.”
“That’s exactly how it feels,” he said, still half-whispering. He put his coffee cup down and shoved it aside.
“Was there something your family referred to as ‘the thing’?” Randa asked. “That’s what Ryland was saying. He said, ‘Tell him that the thing is real.’ ”
Jack froze. He looked numb, like someone who had heard one too many bits of bad news.
“Are you okay?”
He stood up. “Let’s get out of here.”
Before she could answer he was up, on his way to the door. Randa signaled the waitress for the check.
She found him outside, pacing in front of her car. Randa wondered what land mine she’d stepped on this time.
“Where are we going?” she asked, bracing herself for whatever came back at her.
“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I just . . . couldn’t breathe in there.” He took a few steps away from the car, stopped, and stared down the road.
Randa had a sudden idea. “Could I see the house?” she asked. He looked back at her.
“The house?”
“Your family’s house. Is it near here?”
He nodded. “About five miles down Thirty-Six.”
“I’d really love to see it,” she said. She was surprised by her brazenness, but none of this felt real anyway. She was sure that any minute she’d wake up, Cam and Nora would be announcing their engagement, and she’d be working on a story about where to find the best soft tacos in the San Fernando Valley.
“Well . . . okay,” Jack said. “I guess we could go there.”
Randa unlocked the car door quickly, before he changed his mind.
As was usually the case anywhere in Georgia, as soon as they left the town, they were in the boondocks. They rode in silence. Jack stared out the window, but Randa doubted he really saw anything.
The two-lane wound them through the gentle landscape. Rolling hills dotted with grazing cattle; miles of pastures bordered by tall Georgia pines and huge old oak trees. Randa had forgotten how beautiful it was, and how deceptively peaceful.
“What do you know about me?” Jack asked suddenly.
“Not much,” Randa said. She wondered why he was asking. He didn’t say anything else.
“I know you’ve done time,” she said. “Cam told me.”
“I’m sure he did,” Jack said. He had no attitude that she could pinpoint.
“He didn’t tell me what for.”
“Overdue library books,” Jack said without smiling. Randa glanced at him. She thought she could detect the tiniest trace of a smirk.
“What was it really?”
“Armed robbery.”
Randa was stumped for a response.
How interesting. I’ve never driven down a deserted country road with an armed robber before.
“Don’t worry,” he said, breaking the silence. “I gave that up.” He pointed at something up ahead. “Turn left at those mailboxes.”
She turned. There were pastures on either side of the gravel road, enclosed in barbed-wire fencing. In the pasture on the right, a herd of white-faced Herefords were all lying down, feet tucked neatly under their bellies, watching the car with great indifference.
“Guy down the road owns the cows,” Jack offered. “He tends the fence, fertilizes and Bush Hogs the pasture, in return for running his cattle on the land.”
“This is your land? All of it?”
“It’s not that much. Forty-five acres.”
“Where’s the house?”
“Other side of those trees. It’s about half a mile off the road.”
“How on earth did your father afford this?”
“He didn’t. Ryland paid for it. My mother had this stupid theory that my father would settle down if they had their own home, so she talked Ryland into buying this place for us. It went cheap. No one around here wanted it.”
“Why not?”
“Family who lived here right before we bought it . . . guy went nuts one night and took an ax to his wife and three kids, then shot himself. Nobody was in a big mood to live here after that.”
“I’m surprised your mother would.”
“What my mother wanted more than anything else was a permanent address. I guess that won out over potential ghosts.”
“Did anything weird ever happen?”
“If I ever heard anything go bump in the night, it was generally my father slamming my mother’s head against the wall.”
The road curved and suddenly the house was in sight.
There was nothing about it that offered any hint of its ugly past. It was the standard white clapboard story-and-a-half farmhouse with a front porch, the roof of which was supported by concrete and brick pillars. The place wasn’t immaculate, but it wasn’t in a state of disrepair, either. The only thing that would even verge on gothic was the fact that it was so isolated. It
was impossible to see the road from the house, and empty fields stretched out beyond it on all sides. Will must have loved that—plenty of room to wreak havoc on Lucy and the kids, and no one within miles to hear anything and call the cops.
“Forgive the obvious question, but why don’t you live here?” Randa asked, as they emerged from the car.
“Too many bad memories, I guess. As trite as that must sound.”
“Then why don’t you sell it?”
“Partly because I don’t want to deal with all that.”
“What’s the other part?”
“I have this fantasy of striking a match to it.” He didn’t smile when he said it. “Burn it to the ground, just sit here and watch.”
“So why haven’t you?”
“I guess some other part of me needs proof that it all really happened.”
He nodded toward a small barn a few yards away. “I’m going to get something for the ducks.” He was gone, disappearing inside. Randa looked around, wondering what ducks he was talking about. He returned with a small red plastic bucket full of dried corn.
“You don’t mind walking, do you?”
She shook her head and followed him. It was chilly, but the quiet was intoxicating, worth any discomfort. The sky was gray from the storm front that had not quite moved on, and it gave the place a touch of the ominous atmosphere it deserved. Jack led her up a hill, down a shallow valley, and up over a ridge, beyond which lay a small lake. The silence was broken by a frenzy of quacking from the half dozen mallards on the lake, who had seen them coming. Randa smiled. Ducks always seemed like cartoon animals to her. Cute, but surely not meant to be taken seriously. Jack reached into the bucket and tossed a handful of corn to the shoreline. The ducks waddled out of the water and all dove after the same kernel, not noticing that the ground was yellow-speckled all around them.
Randa watched Jack watching the ducks. No matter how he felt about the house, he and the land suited each other nicely. It was the first place she had seen him look as if he belonged. He seemed almost calm.