No Doors, No Windows

by Joe Schreiber

  “You all right?” he asked when she came back out of the bathroom. He was still naked, sprawled out on the sheets, idly playing with himself as he watched her get dressed. When she didn’t react, he stretched his arms and gave her a casual flex of the biceps. His body was probably in better shape now than when he’d played pro football; he said he worked out three hours a day at the gym that Colette had built for him, and the evidence was right in front of her.

  “Fine.”

  “What’s wrong, princess?”

  “I hate when you call me that.” She cocked her head, stuck her right earring through her ear, and felt the backing slip from her fingers and fall onto the cheap motel carpet. “Damn it.”

  “Guess who I saw last night?” Red asked.

  “Who?”

  “Your old boyfriend from back in the day.”

  Sonia looked up from where she was trying to find the missing piece of the earring. “Scott and I were just friends.”

  “Guess where I saw him.”

  “Thrill me.”

  “At my house.” Now his smile looked both rueful and bemused. “Talking to my wife.”

  “Oh?” Sonia tried to sound disinterested and glanced at Red to see how successful she’d been. But his face, while smiling, was almost neutral, as if he were looking to her to put what he’d seen in perspective. “Did you say hello?”

  “They were coming out as I was coming in.”

  “They?”

  “He had the kid with him. You know, his nephew.”

  “Henry?” Sonia frowned. She was thinking about Owen, the way he’d staggered and stumbled through the overgrown grass as Scott had walked him across the yard and inside the house the other night. It was hard to imagine anyone in that condition being able to take care of himself, let alone a five-year-old; Sonia knew from experience how bad Owen could sometimes get. When she was tending bar, the only way to get him to slow his drinking down was to ask questions about Henry, turning his thoughts back to the responsibilities at home. And sometimes it worked.

  “Henry.” As he often seemed to do, Red had read her mind. “That’s Owen’s kid, right? Scott’s brother.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Whatever happened with you two anyway?” Red asked, scratching his thick patch of chest hair as he gazed up at the cracked ceiling. “You and Mr. Greeting Card, I mean. Sounds like back in high school you two should have at least had a friendly little roll in the hay … or whatever you people roll around in, in these parts. Snow? Maple leaves?”

  “Is there a point to any of this?”

  “Hold up.” He pushed himself up on his elbows, looking at her. “Did Scott and Colette ever …?”

  “What?” Sonia shrugged. “I never asked.”

  “Owen told me you guys almost hit it off until you kicked Scott to the curb.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Maybe it was because you caught him and Colette bumping uglies.”

  Sonia looked at her watch. “You’re a poet.”

  “See, that’s what I love about you,” he said, climbing out of bed, still naked, half erect, coming over to the open door to plant a kiss on her cheek, almost chastely, his stubble rubbing against her chin. “Some days you’re the saddest little girl in the great state of New Hampshire.”

  “No,” she said, “that would be your poor neglected wife. Why don’t you go home and make her some waffles?”

  Red laughed. “You off tonight?”

  “I’m working.”

  “Then I’ll see you at the bar.”

  “I’ll be counting the seconds,” she said.

  The sound of his laughter followed her out to her car.

  SCRAPS OF SNOW LAY on the ground, soggy confetti from some long-gone parade. The granite sky was flat and cloudless, clear back to the mountains. She shivered inside her coat, starting the engine and blasting on the heat. Her brain felt foggy from not enough sleep.

  Red had started out as a diversion, a friendly face at the bar. Given his NFL history, she had expected machismo, a surfeit of overconfidence, but to her surprise, he was understated, a good listener with a genuine sense of humor. There was a worldliness to him that attracted her, and a soulful quality that she thought had come along with everything he’d gone through in New York. Just the fact that he’d chosen to marry someone like Colette McGuire, at this point in their lives, had—in and of itself—almost made him interesting enough to pursue on its own merits.

  Now, though, she wasn’t thinking about him at all but about Scott, and why he and Henry would have gone over to see Colette.

  Research, she thought. For his book. It could have just been research, but why wouldn’t he mention something like that?

  And a better question:

  Why do you care?

  “I don’t.” She found an old Motown CD, the Supremes, and put it in, turned the volume up loud. It was wrong for the moment, and she tossed it aside, fishing through her CD wallet until she found Billie Holiday’s Body and Soul. Moments later, Lady Day was singing “Gee Baby, Ain’t I Good to You.” Spread underneath the winter New Hampshire sky, her voice filled the car with almost unbearable hurt, but Sonia let it play anyway.

  Her cell phone buzzed. Red. She turned the song down.

  “Yes?”

  “Take a look in your glove compartment.”

  She opened it. An envelope fell out. Fat and heavy, bristling with twenties, and a couple of hundreds tucked in at the back. “Red—” “It’s for your dad.”

  Happy to be your whore, she thought, with such sudden, jagged viciousness that it startled her, as if she’d just swallowed a chunk of broken glass. Red would have been hurt if she’d ever said anything like that to him. In spite of everything, he had an unexpectedly sweet streak, an almost childlike eagerness to please, and had told her on multiple occasions that he’d continue to give her money for the medical bills even if she stopped sleeping with him. He’d just never understand how it felt opening an envelope of cash when she could still feel his semen dried on her thighs.

  “Thanks,” she managed.

  “And I’ll still see you tonight, right?”

  “Tonight,” she said, and hung up, putting the pedal to the metal, driving away from there as fast as she could.

  BACK IN TOWN, Sonia drove past the partially renovated Bijou Theatre on the left side of the street and slowed down, even though she was already running late. There was a blackened pit in the middle of the wreckage, and she watched the workmen carrying out wheelbarrows of burned debris, old theater seats, and mounds of broken brick. One of the workers climbed up on an aluminum ladder rising from the hole in the ground, rubbed his hands on his pants, and started running toward the trailer that served as the office. The man wove his path through the debris with a combination of urgency and hesitation that Sonia found very familiar, and when she finally caught a glimpse of his face, she realized it was Owen.

  She beeped and slowed down, but he didn’t even look up at her. He was already storming up the wooden steps to the office as fast as he could. As he turned to knock on the door, Sonia saw he had some round flattened object tucked under his coat. It looked like some kind of narrow wheel or oversized serving plate, but Owen was cradling it in both arms, hunched over it as if he’d just unearthed a relic from some lost civilization.

  She stopped the car completely, traffic bulking up behind her at the intersection as she craned her neck back and to the left. Before she could get a better look at the relic, the trailer door had already swung open and he’d vanished inside, the door clapping shut behind him.

  Behind her, the blast of a horn she’d initially confused for Lester Young’s saxophone on the car stereo snapped her back into the moment. Pulling ahead, Sonia made a mental note to ask Red when she saw him about what exactly had motivated the McGuire family, after ignoring the ruined remains of the Bijou for all these years, to choose this moment for what was surely a complicated and expensive renovation. It was a problem she wasn’t aware
had been preoccupying her until very recently. Seeing Owen scurry from the pit to the mobile home with the object under his arm had crystallized it for her.

  Red will know.

  If Colette McGuire had an angle, Red would already be playing it. Whatever else Red Fontana might have been, Sonia sometimes thought of his opportunism as a pair of glasses that allowed her to see clearly into the town where she’d grown up, a place whose byzantine complexity—people doing things they didn’t want to do, people doing things they didn’t know they were doing, people doing things for the wrong reasons—often left her baffled. She saw too much. Red saw only what he wanted to see, what he could take. He slept with her because he liked it, and Sonia was willing to trade on that for a little outsider’s insight into Milburn.

  Who’s the opportunist now? she mused. Maybe we’re more alike than I thought. And for the first time that morning, the almost unbearably sad voice of Billie Holiday pouring up through her vehicle’s sound system actually sounded like music.

  SCOTT STARED AT THE LAPTOP screen and heard his stomach growl.

  He hadn’t eaten all day—had last ventured into the kitchen for coffee sometime in the afternoon—and without the punctuation of meals, another entire day had slipped by. When he turned to look out the large, not-quite-rectangular windows, he was startled to see that it was dark. That couldn’t be true, but it was.

  He got up and stood by the window, gazing out across the yard, where bare tree branches enclosed the grounds. The sense of pure isolation was absolute.

  He knew that if he were to put on his coat and gloves and walk outside with a flashlight, crossing the grounds to where the trees took over, he could go for a long time without encountering anything. He could stand out there and scream as loud as he wanted and no one would hear. There would be only the great sprawling house out here in the middle of nowhere, a house that had no business being this far from town, and the woods that kept it secret.

  I won’t go out there, he thought. It’s too late, and I still have work to do.

  But standing up and going to the window had distracted him. His thoughts swung back to his great-grandfather H. G. Mast and the painting of Round House that hung on the other side of the first floor. It seemed to Scott that the painting and the story were all about the same thing, not just the house but something in it that all the Mast men had seen and struggled in their clumsy dreamers’ way to understand. Apparently part of that struggle involved losing track of time, whole quantum lapses at a stretch.

  He went back to the laptop and sat down. The drive to understand was powerful now, a constant and provocative itch. Some part of him understood that his discontinuation of the drugs was part of that poignancy, but there was another aspect of it too, not so easily explained.

  Creative visualization.

  I am Faircloth, he thought again. I’m Faircloth, and my wife is dead, and I still have these files in front of me. Of course there were no actual files about Rosemary Carver, but hadn’t that helped him before, that element of self-hypnosis, closing his eyes and seeing the story?

  He closed his eyes and imagined piles of reports about the disappearance of the girl, the way that his protagonist would have seen them. Something in there, a handle that would allow him to continue where he had left off the story.

  The girl, yes, and the painting, but something else besides.

  The man.

  Rosemary’s father.

  Scott opened his eyes and typed:

  Faircloth couldn’t sleep.

  The people in town had already started asking about Maureen. Always the dutiful husband, he had told them that she’d gone down to Boston to visit her mother. An extended visit, perhaps several weeks–the poor dear was quite sick, lumbago, a chronic affliction that only got worse this time of year.

  At night while he sat here in the huge, empty dining room of the house and fed stick after stick into the fire with a steady hand, Faircloth thought about how long it would be until concerned townsfolk started asking more direct questions. Shouldn’t she be back by now? Was she all right? How long had it been since he’d spoken to her? And then the whispers behind his back, followed inevitably by a visit from the sheriff, the estimable Dave Wood. The polite inquiries followed by the not so polite, the first unspoken accusation, and ultimately the search of the premises, the abandonment of all pretense of politeness. They would be looking for a corpse.

  It would take a dozen men as many hours to search every room of Round House. Like the man in the Poe story, Faircloth would invite them to tear it apart beam by beam if they so wished. To marvel at the strict and stringent commitment that its original architects had made toward avoiding every straight line, blending and smoothing every corner. And in doing so, they would find nothing. It went without saying. No body, no corpse, no trace of poor Maureen, who had died confused and strangling on her own blood, with a single bullet in her forehead, while Faircloth stood over her.

  No clue.

  Rosemary Carver had taken care of that.

  Faircloth turned from the woodstove fire to the piles of paper that he had collected here, amusing old historic documents and affidavits with signatures long since faded. He began sorting through the relics. Since he killed Maureen, his interest in Rosemary Carver had galvanized into something like obsession. He wanted to know everything possible about the girl in the blue dress, the thing that had welcomed him here and taken care of his problems with his whorish, drunken lout of a wife. He wanted–

  Here he stopped, looking down at the item he had just uncovered. It was an old daguerreotype of the sort manufactured after the Civil War, and it showed a tall man in a black suit with a tall black hat looking steadily back at the camera. The shadow of the hat’s brim eclipsed the man’s features except for the bright sickle of his grin. His long arm hung around the shoulder of a small girl. The girl was Rosemary Carver.

  Faircloth knew that the man was her father.

  There was a sudden thud, and Scott sat up with a jolt, jerking so hard he almost knocked the laptop from his knees, crying out “Oh Jesus!” His vision of himself as Faircloth—Faircloth’s research spread all around him—was so clear and compelling in his mind that he was actually surprised to look around and find the room empty except for his computer and the fire in the woodstove. He had seen the paperwork here, stacked around him, just as Faircloth had seen it in the story. In that regard, at least, the act of self-hypnosis had been utterly effective. He was both awed and a little frightened by how successful the tactic had been.

  His heart was pounding. He held his breath.

  Another noise resonated through the dining room, a single unmistakable thump.

  Scott felt the small hairs stiffening over the back of his neck, down his forearms, an absolute alertness to the particulars of this moment. All the solitude that came from being out here, miles from town, miles from anyone, arrived back with him now, the knowledge that in this dark pocket of the country, he was all alone.

  And yet he wasn’t alone.

  He sat listening, waiting to hear it again.

  When it came, it wasn’t a thumping sound. What he heard now was a series of plaintive scratching noises, like an animal trying to claw its way through the walls. His mouth was sucked completely dry, so arid that his lips felt glued shut.

  Looking up from the computer, he realized that the scratching noises were coming from behind the door on the other side of the dining room, the door that—in his father’s novel—led to the black wing, where Faircloth had stashed his wife’s body.

  But of course there’s nothing back there, because that place only exists in this book. If I open that door now, all I’m going to find is an empty closet with some dead flies on the shelves.

  Very carefully, determined not to tremble as he moved, he placed the computer next to him on the settee and stood up. More than ever, the floor felt slightly angled beneath his feet, the corners of the room even more rounded. He walked across the dining room to the door and r
ested one hand on the knob. It was cold, as cold as the keys that he’d found in the front door.

  He turned the handle.

  The door swung open.

  What he found himself looking at was not an empty closet. Instead, the space that was revealed was a long black corridor full of darkness and frigid air, giving way to a profoundly blank and open passageway, as if there were some entirely separate house hidden within this one. There was a noise like a gasp from deep inside.

  Releasing the doorknob, Scott started to walk into the corridor.

  As he set foot in it, he felt something slide off his lap. With a jerk and a grunt of surprise, he reached down instinctively, groping at it. The whole world rotated sideways on its hinges like a magician’s stage prop, and Scott realized that he was still sitting on the settee, the laptop on his knees.

  He had never stood up at all.

  He had been sitting here the whole time.

  Writing.

  Looking down at the screen, he read:

  Faircloth put his hand on the knob and opened the door. It was completely dark in there, and he couldn’t see any end to it, as if he could walk in and just keep going forever. A noise came from somewhere in the very back, a noise like a gasp or a sigh or a very faint laugh.

  Faircloth started walking inside.

  “HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN OFF your medication?” Sonia asked.

  It was the next morning, and Scott was in the kitchen of the house, talking to her on the phone as he poured coffee into the biggest cup he could find. “Who told you about that?”

  “I’m only asking because I’m concerned. Last night you called and told me you thought you were cracking up.”