“Maybe they’re coming another way round?”
“They’re not. They’d have been here by now. They’ve gone and they’ve taken the children. I don’t know why, but they’ve taken the children. Oh Jesus Christ!”
They looked at each other and for a moment said nothing. Paul’s breath froze in the air in little clouds.
“Call the police,” said Cassie. “No, wait. Maybe they’re still in the house? They got delayed or they’re playing a joke.”
“There’s no car at the back.”
“Let’s check the house.”
Together they ran up the front path. The door was locked so Paul knocked hard. When no one came he put his elbow through the stained glass and reached inside to open the door. They entered the house. Paul ran upstairs. Cassie checked the living room and the kitchen. Something made her open cupboard doors in the kitchen. The cupboards were empty. There was no food, nor were there any pots and pans other than the ones they had used the night before. She ran into the living room, where she remembered seeing an oak cabinet with closed doors. It too was empty.
“Paul!” she shouted upstairs.
“Cassie!” he shouted from above. “Come up here!”
She ran upstairs.
“Look!” he said.
The filing cabinet in Penny’s office was empty. The laptop had disappeared from the table. The desk tidy was as suspiciously tidy as before. In the bedroom that they had said was theirs, the wardrobes contained nothing but a few rattling wire hangers. In Connor’s room it was the same story. Drawers filled with stale air. Empty cupboards that they had presumed were stuffed with toys.
No one lived in this house. No one at all.
MARC LECARD
The Admiral’s House
MARC LECARD’S CRIME NOVEL, Vinnie’s Head, came out from St Martin’s Minotaur in 2007. It was followed by a second, Tiny Little Troubles.
His short stories have appeared in several anthologies and magazines, most recently in Killer Year: Stories to Die For and All Hallows. He lives in Oakland, California.
“In the town I grew up in there was a house like the house in the story that follows,” explains the author, “much older than the surrounding suburban houses, a house with a tremendous presence.
“I used to wonder what went on there, what stories it had to tell. I never heard any, though, and was forced to make up my own.”
WE ALWAYS CALLED IT the admiral’s house. Easily the oldest house in town, it had been built right on the bay shore, facing the water, back before the suburban grid was laid out and smaller houses came to crowd around it. Broad and comfortable, with a little square turret, it was a classic Victorian “summer cottage”, many rooms larger than my parents’ house.
While I was growing up it had actually been lived in by an admiral and his family – a handsome wife, a trio of young sons. I knew Dougal, the middle, son from school; we were good, but not close friends. He was athletic and popular, far above me in the high school caste system, though he always treated me well when we met. He even invited me to his graduation party. That pleased me more than I would have thought.
The admiral’s house always seemed to me to embody a kind of unattainable perfection – unattainable by me, anyway. The house itself, the tiny perfect crescent of beach, the family so good-looking, so well-mannered, members of a club that had no other local representatives – all this was more than I could hope to live up to.
In the event my life was changed, the course of it set by the terrible thing that took place there.
I never meant to come back to the town where I grew up. It wasn’t the kind of place people stayed in or came back to – a faceless suburb, meant for raising children, for leaving as soon as you were able. But I was childless, by choice, and after my wife died I found I couldn’t possibly stay where we had lived our life together. So I sold the house, sold my business, and crawled back to my parents’ house (they were dead now and the house was empty) to lick my wounds and decide what if anything I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
Being back in my hometown was eerie and oppressive. I had been gone for nearly thirty years. No one I had known growing up still lived there. I walked the streets feeling like a memory fragment, a ghost haunting my own past. Slowly, without realizing it, I became a kind of recluse, avoiding the neighbours, going out after dark if at all. I began to drink too much.
Then at the liquor store one night, stocking up, I finally ran into someone I used to know.
It was Dougal, the admiral’s middle son. When I had known him in high school he was a strong, handsome guy, bold without arrogance, friendly and generous. Life had changed him; at first I didn’t recognize the haggard, hunched old man ahead of me in line, waiting to pay for his booze. But when he turned to go, something in his profile woke my memory.
“Dougal? Dougal MacAlester?”
His head snapped towards me, eyes round with what looked like fear. In that instant it occurred to me that some terrible illness or mental breakdown accounted for his presence in town. Somewhat like myself.
“Dougal, I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t mean to startle you. Do you remember me? We were in high school together.”
Dougal looked back at me, clearly upset. Slowly his features relaxed and I saw that he knew me.
“Sure, John, I remember you. How have you been?” He shook my hand; the bag he was carrying clinked and rattled as he shifted it to his left arm.
We talked easily together as we walked around to the parking lot. I was unreasonably glad to run in to someone I knew. Dougal apparently felt the same.
“Why don’t you come over to my place?” he asked as we paused in front of my car. “Have a drink, talk about how it used to be?”
“Sure, I’d like that,” I said. “Where are you living now?”
A shifty look came over his face, hesitant and dishonest, not at all the way I remembered him.
“Same place,” he said. “Same old place, down by the water, you know. Dad’s house. You know where it is.”
The admiral’s house was as I remembered it, still a window into another era in the bland suburban street. It had a shut-up, neglected air, though, and even in the dark I could see it hadn’t been well cared for.
Stepping through the wide door into the foyer was like stepping out onto a stage. Memories began to wash over me, things I hadn’t thought about since the day they had happened. It was as if this door had been shut up and never opened since the last time I had been through it.
They were not all pleasant memories. But in a way my real life had begun there.
After letting us in, Dougal began to walk straight through the house, head down, like a man on a mission.
“Dougal, wait,” I called out after him. “Let me look at the house. I haven’t been here since . . .”
He stopped and looked back at me.
“Since the party?” he asked.
I nodded.
“What do you want to see?” he muttered. “It’s all shut up now, anyway. Too much house for one man.”
I looked around at the darkened rooms that opened off the foyer, sheets over most of the furniture, a musty, stale smell in the air.
“Are you all by yourself in here?”
“I had someone come in for a while, clean the place,” he said, answering the question I hadn’t asked. “But I got rid of her. Too much money; it’s easier just to keep it closed up.”
“You should rent it, live somewhere else, in the city maybe.”
Dougal peered at me for a second, as if looking for some hidden meaning in what I had just said. Then he laughed, a short, sharp, barking laugh.
“I have to be here now,” he said.
He took me right through the house to the back room, overlooking the water. I remembered it well; a broad, sunny room, the width of the house, windows all around. Many-paned French windows opened onto a broad deck, with a sand beach beyond, the blue stretch of the bay from wall to wall.
N
ow of course it was black dark outside, just a few lights across the water, and a streak of white moonlight painted over it.
The room was hot after a hot day. The French windows were all shut up, but a screened window to one side let in a little breeze off the water.
Dougal bent over and flicked on one small lamp in the corner; it barely threw enough light to keep us from barking our shins on the furniture as we found chairs and broke open the bottles.
“I don’t like a lot of light,” Dougal felt the need to explain. “Hurts my eyes.”
I was not sorry for the shadows myself.
Dougal ignored me as he focused on removing a bottle of bourbon from the bag, unscrewing the top and pouring the brown liquor into a tall glass with squint-eyed precision. He gulped half the glass in a piece, held still while the bourbon ran into him, then sat back and turned to me.
“It’s good to see you here, John. After all these years.”
“I never thought I’d be in this house again,” I said honestly.
“You remember that party?” Dougal asked. “The graduation party?”
I did. I had every reason to remember it.
“Angus was there,” Dougal said. “That was just before Angus shipped out.”
I remembered Angus, the oldest brother. He had joined the Marines, came back to dazzle us with his dress uniform, his short hair and iron posture. Then they shipped him to Vietnam. He never came back.
“My poor parents. That took the heart out of them, first Finn, then Angus getting killed,” he said. “It was like they became old people over night. Even the admiral.
“But Angus was still with us for the party. That was a great day, up to the end, anyway. The last great day.”
“Nothing was ever the same after that, was it?” I said.
Dougal didn’t answer. He stared angrily out at the moonlight on the water.
“They’re all dead, now, you know. The family,” he said. “I’m the last one. This is my house now.”
“It’s the same with me, Dougal,” I said. “Not that my house is anything to compare with this place.”
He snorted. “This place. I’d burn it down if I could. I should. Just burn it.”
“The admiral’s house?” I was shocked. “Why would you even think of doing that?”
“Too much pain,” Dougal said. “Too much pain, too many memories.”
We sat in the dark, in silence, for a long time. When he spoke again it was as if he was allowing me back in to a conversation that streamed constantly through his head.
“You remember my other brother? Finn?”
Foolishly I had been hoping to avoid talking about Finn. But what else was there to talk about, in that house? I nodded without speaking.
“I never liked Finn,” Dougal said.
“I never knew him,” I said. “Not really.” Finn had been younger than us, the youngest brother. He would have been around sixteen I guess at the time of the party, almost seventeen.
“He was always gunning for me. Nobody else could ever see it, they thought I was imagining it, but he was always trying to needle me, undermine me. I think he wanted to pry me away from dad. Not that dad ever paid much attention to any of us.
“Anyway, I couldn’t really stand him. But I would have left it alone if it hadn’t been for Jeanne.”
“Jeanne Cary?” I asked.
“Uh-huh,” Dougal said. “You remember her?”
I nodded; I didn’t trust myself to speak.
“Sure you do,” Dougal said. “Anyone would remember Jeanne Cary.” He fiddled with his glass, filled it up again. “I loved her, you know.”
“So did I. Everyone loved her.”
“Not like I did. I never loved anyone like that, before or since. My whole soul was bound up in her every movement. I didn’t even know I had a soul, before. Jeanne took it and never knew she had it. And she wouldn’t have cared if she had known.
“Oh, she was nice enough to me, not a bitch, I mean. Not cruel at all. We even went out for a while, but it wasn’t real. It was like she was doing me a favour, to not hurt my feelings. I could tell it didn’t really mean anything to her.
“That was not the way she felt about Finn.
“I knew there was something between them, right from the first. Finn was younger than she was, barely a kid. but they had known each other all their lives, since they were little. They had always gotten along, I guess, and as they got older that deepened into something beyond friendship. I could see it; I hated to see it, but I did. That should have been me.
“But what could I say? He was my brother. It wouldn’t have done any good anyway. So I kept my feelings to myself.
“But at the graduation party, when I saw her there, laughing, flirting, talking to Finn, I couldn’t stand it. There was something around them, a force field, something between them and the rest of the world. They were together, and all the rest of us were out here, on the other side.
“I don’t even know if they understood it themselves, in any conscious way. But I could see it. And it made me crazy.
“That day at the graduation party, I kept coming across them. Not in any kind of compromising position, I mean, not making-out or even holding hands. Just standing there, talking. But I could see it, the energy between them, the way they looked at each other. They were together. I couldn’t take it.”
Dougal paused to take a drink. When he stopped talking you could hear the waves breaking on the beach outside. The bay had always been part of the admiral’s house for me, almost an extension of it. There were no lights on the deck, but the moonlight touched up the shape of things and spilled across the water, so that you could see the silhouettes of neighbouring houses, boats tied up nearby, a distant line of houses on the other shore of the cove, hunched up in the dark with a few lights burning.
“You know those islands across the bay?” Dougal asked. “The barrier islands. You can see them easily in daylight, green bars on the horizon. They’re only about, I don’t know, four miles away.” Dougal looked toward the islands, invisible in the dark, sipping at his bourbon.
“I went up to Finn, pointed to those islands.
“ ‘Think you could swim to those islands?’” I asked him. ‘Little brother?’
“He looked at me, a little up and down look like he couldn’t believe I was really that lame.
“ ‘Sure,’ he said.
“ ‘Well come on then.’
“ ‘What, right now?’
“ ‘Right now. Unless you think you can’t,’ I pushed him. ‘Unless you don’t have it.’
“I knew he was a punk swimmer, no stamina. I also knew that Jeanne was right there, talking to someone else, but well within hearing. She was looking over at us, frowning a little. I knew she was about to come over and come between us, so I pushed Finn harder.
“ ‘Come on, little brother, if you can,’ and I turned and ran and dove into the water, without even taking my shirt off.
“He was right behind me, like I knew he would be.
“We were both a little drunk by then, I guess. We swam out across the cove, into the big part of the bay. It had been a warm day, and the bay was pretty calm, dead still. We tore it up.
“After a while I pulled up and looked behind me. Finn was still coming on, a little further behind now. I could just see the house, and the beach. I couldn’t make out the people; I doubt they could see us at all.
“When Finn was almost up to me I took off again.
“The bay’s pretty shallow for the most part. In a good low tide you could walk across most of it. But there’s one part where the channel comes out from between the islands, where it shelves off, pretty deep. The water gets dark there. You can feel it get colder, deeper, more powerful. You can almost feel that the water is a being, there, a living thing, that knows you’re there. Do you know what I mean? It’s frightening, sometimes.
“When we got to the deep part I was far ahead of Finn. Then I thought I heard him call out, call
my name: ‘Dougal!’ I stopped swimming, and hung there, paddling, looking back towards him. At first I couldn’t see him; I remember thinking he must have gone under. Then his head came up. He was close enough that I could see his eyes, popping out with panic.
“ ‘Doog!’ he yelled, ‘Doog! help me!’ Then he went down again.
“I just hung there. There was something cold in me, cold and unmoveable, cold and dark like the deep water.
“It’s not true what they say about a drowning man goes down three times. Finn never came up again.
“I watched my brother drown, man! I watched my brother drown.
“After a while I swam over to where I saw him last, and dove down. I didn’t see anything the first time. Visibility’s never very good in the bay, too much mud and sediment stirred up all the time.
“The second time I went down I saw something pale, floating with its arms hanging. Maybe he was dead already, I don’t know. I didn’t try to find out.
“I came up again, and started yelling and waving my arms. just in case there was anyone around I hadn’t noticed, boaters or fishermen; we were way too far from the beach for them to hear us, or even make us out against the water. Then I began to swim back.”
The heavy night was heavier now, the darkness thicker. This is why he brought me here, I thought, to make this confession. But there was more to come.
I thought back to Dougal’s return, shivering in the stern of the boat that had finally gone out after them, wrapped in a blanket, his long blond hair darkened by the water, hanging down around his face.
They never found Finn’s body. People thought it must have been carried out by the tide through the channel and out to sea.
We were quiet for a long while after he told me about Finn. Dougal drank pretty steadily, looking out over the water, his eyes searching for something, as if he were trying to see back through the years to two swimming figures headed for the distant islands.
Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. The silence seemed to pack my head until I thought it would explode.
“Where did you go, Dougal? After that?” I asked him. “I lost touch with you. We all did.”
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