Scary Stuff

by Sharon Fiffer

  The heavy furniture, the crowding that characterized the first-floor rooms, was absent. In fact, there was no furniture except for a small round table in the center of the room. On the table was a tall gold vase with two handles. It reminded Jane of a loving cup, an old athletic trophy.

  “We’re here, Brother,” said Ada. She stood aside and held out her hand as if presenting the trophy to Jane.

  “My brother James,” she said. “He’s delighted that you came to see him.”

  Jane looked around, knowing there wasn’t anyone in the room, but holding on to some hope that the situation might become clearer.

  “Hello, Cousin James,” said Nellie, now openly laughing. “How are you?”

  “Oh Nellie,” said Ada, smiling slightly herself. “You know how he is.” Ada looked at Jane who shook her head. With her strong left hand, she grasped Jane’s wrist.

  “Dead, dear. Brother James is still dead.”

  9

  “I wish you could see yourself,” said Nellie.

  Jane didn’t have to look at herself in the mirror. She felt the blood drain, she felt the wash of eau de creepy come over her as she stood with Ada in front of what she called her brother’s “cre-mains.”

  What Jane found especially odd was how matter-of-fact Ada was about the situation. Here was her mother’s cousin, which made her Jane’s second cousin, she assumed—she would straighten this all out with Nellie later—who was a candidate for top model in Halloween Monthly or Crone’s Digest, complete with the long gray hair, ominous air, and black clothes, now completely composed and practical as she chatted about Brother James’s death.

  “A year ago, James felt sick,” Ada explained. “I gathered the healing herbs from the yard and made him tea and my mama’s broth and fed him all the cures we used growing up, but nothing took. He got weaker and weaker, and one day he told me he was going to die that evening. He had made a list for me of what I was to do, the phone number I was supposed to call. He had arranged for the man to come and take him away . . . everything. He knew how hard . . .” Ada paused here, her voice catching. “We were twins. He knew me better than anybody and we took care of each other all our lives.”

  Nellie, in what could only be called an awkward gesture, patted Ada on her shoulder. “You seem to be doing good, Ada.”

  Ada shook her head. “I was always slower than the other kids, I couldn’t hear very good and Ma and Pa didn’t know that for a long time. And since I didn’t know it, either . . .” Ada shrugged her shoulders.

  “Brother made sure nobody took advantage of me.”

  Ada put one bony hand on the urn.

  “He still does.”

  Jane nodded. It was truly remarkable that Ada’s faith could provide her with the confidence to carry on, even when she had seemingly never been prepared for life alone. Here was Ada, aged anywhere from 75 to 175, keeping up this house, even managing to decorate it for the holiday, fretting over whether or not she’d be able to hand out homemade candy to trick-or-treaters.

  “I’m sure he watches over you, Ada,” said Jane.

  Ada nodded.

  “He told me I’d never have to worry about a thing and he was right. With his help, everything runs smooth as silk.”

  Ada backed away from Brother James and ushered them out of the room.

  “We have to go,” said Nellie. “Ada, you understand? We have to go back to Kankakee.”

  Ada nodded. Back on the first floor, Jane automatically reached for a light switch. A faint light came on overhead.

  “No dear, no lights necessary yet. It’s hardly night,” said Ada, switching off the power.

  “Will you finish your pumpkin, Cousin Nellie?” asked Ada.

  “Yes, finish it, Mom. I think I left my sweater in the study,” said Jane. “I’ll be right with you.”

  Jane heard Nellie protest, but the two older women walked back toward the kitchen while Jane detoured back to the study. It was time to use her hands as well as her eyes. The mail that had been neatly stacked on the desk had envelopes with it. Jane needed to jot down names and addresses. She would ask Ada, too, but she had to be cautious. A devoted sister might not want to believe her brother had anything to do with something dishonest. She would probably be right. If he had been dead for a year, how could James Speller be Honest Joe? And even if Brother James were Michael’s physical twin, he was Ada’s actual twin—the photographs of the two men certainly wouldn’t match up in age. Michael said everyone who had approached him had mentioned the face or the eyes, but no one said anything about the photo having a man in it wearing vintage clothes—which is the only way a photo of Jim Speller and a photo of Michael would match up agewise. Jane stopped in the doorway and scanned the bookcases again. She looked for photo albums or any frames with family photos tucked among the books, but she saw none. There were no photos on the desk, either, no pictures, no trinkets . . . just one heavy glass paperweight, a carved wooden box that Jane guessed might be used for stamps although it was empty now, and an intricate silver-topped inkwell and pen. It was museumlike in its arrangement. Only the small pile of mail had given the room any sense of contemporary life. Now that it was gone, the room had turned back into a giant display case.

  Now that it was gone.

  Jane walked into the room, stepped around to the other side of the desk, and carefully opened the drawers one by one. Stationery that Jane assumed had belonged to the parents of Ada and James was in the top center drawer. The side drawers held bottles of ink, a few brass clips, and some yellowed envelopes. Jane picked up a silver cigarette case. Opening it, she smelled old tobacco. JWS was engraved on the front of the case. Brother Jim was a smoker, or perhaps he was named after his father? Fine, all the trappings of the men who had used that office, who had sat in that chair eighty years ago, but where was the mail that had been there less than thirty minutes ago?

  The woman who had presented herself as the caregiver must have taken it. She had pretended to leave, simply opening and closing the front door. She waited for Jane to go upstairs with Ada and Nellie, and came back into the room and got it. She could be Honest Joe herself. Jane hurried into the kitchen.

  “Ada,” Jane said, speaking loudly and carefully directly in front of her cousin, “I need to ask you some questions.”

  “Leave her alone,” said Nellie, who was opening and closing cupboard doors, seemingly taking stock. “She doesn’t know anything.”

  “Do you know who this is?” Jane held up the photograph of Michael.

  Ada took it with both hands and held it in front of her face. Her smoky glasses hid her eyes, but Jane could see movement behind the lenses. It was like watching someone read a script. Memorizing the lines. Ada concentrated, looking back and forth, back and forth.

  “No,” she said, handing back the photograph. “I don’t know that boy.”

  Jane slipped Michael’s picture back into her bag.

  “Okay, how about the woman who checks in on you? She was here a little while ago, in the study with me. Maybe she’s a nurse or a neighbor?”

  “No, I don’t need a nurse. I feel fine.”

  “Is there a woman who drops in on you, comes by to say hello? She’s about my height, maybe younger than I, but with dark hair, a premature gray streak in front,” Jane said, thinking hard about anything that distinguished the ordinary-looking woman who had appeared behind her in the study. “She walks softly, she was wearing soft black canvas shoes, like ballet flats—”

  “What the hell does that mean, ‘like ballet flats’?” said Nellie. “How the hell is she supposed to know ballet slippers? She hasn’t been out of this house in seventy years.”

  Jane shook her head. Nellie might be exaggerating her cousin’s closeted life, but in the end, she was right. Ada wasn’t the type of person to identify someone by clothing style or comparisons to anyone outside of her world.

  “She moved like a cat,” said Jane, remembering the tabby that had sidled up to her on the porch yesterday. �
�A quiet surprise.”

  Ada nodded.

  “That’s the woman who wanted to marry my brother. She came over here and fussed over him. All the girls wanted to marry James. He liked her all right, but he didn’t want to marry her. She doesn’t come over here anymore.”

  “She doesn’t stop in? To see if you need anything? To help you run the house, pay your bills?” asked Jane.

  “Don’t need her,” said Ada, picking up her knife. “I got a lot of pumpkins to finish.”

  “Who bought the pumpkins? Where do you get your food?” Jane felt herself losing what Detective Oh called “dispassionate remove.”

  Remember, Mrs. Wheel, there is a balance of concern and commitment in every interaction. If you seem to care too much, you make the other person wary of weighing in too heavily. If you keep a distance, a quietude, the person with whom you converse will want to add more to the transaction, to make it weigh enough. Your dispassionate remove will draw someone out enough to give you what you need, he had told her. And right now, she was all passion and weight, and Ada, just as Oh would have predicted, retreated into carving another jack-o’-lantern.

  Jane sat down opposite Ada and picked up the knife that Nellie had left.

  “Ada,” Jane said, “I love Halloween and I love jack-o’-lanterns. May I come back and help you with the carving?”

  “Yes,” said Ada. “Cousin Nellie, will you come back?”

  “Yeah,” said Nellie, “I guess I can come.” She offered it up like a challenge. “If Jane will drive me out here, I’ll come.”

  Jane looked at Nellie’s jack-o’-lantern. The snaggle-toothed frown seemed familiar. The eyes, though, were almond shaped with brows cut out arching downward to emphasize the frown. The nose was a flattened oval, small, delicate even. Jane was surprised. She remembered Nellie’s efficient, fast pumpkin carving from her childhood—a smile or a frown, a tooth or two, then three quick triangles for eyes and nose. She seemed to have gotten more creative in her old age.

  Jane stood to leave. Nellie finished her inspection of the pantry. Ada embraced Nellie, still holding her knife, making Jane cringe. It didn’t seem safe to leave this woman here by herself. Breathing deeply, hearing Oh’s voice in her head, she kept her voice calm and undemanding.

  “Ada, are you sure you’re all right here alone?”

  “I’m not alone,” Ada replied.

  Jane nodded, Nellie sighed, and they moved toward the front door.

  Jane, thinking of the past hour step-by-step, stopped at the dining room table and turned back toward the kitchen.

  “How did you finish carving that pumpkin?” she asked her mother.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “When we went upstairs, you had only carved the mouth of that pumpkin. Remember? I told you to leave the knife. And we were together the rest of the time in the house, except when I went back to the study to—”

  “Get your sweater?” asked Nellie. “The one you never wore in here in the first place?”

  “I was gone a few minutes, not long enough.”

  “I didn’t have time for that carving nonsense. I had to check on her food supplies.”

  “Who carved that pumpkin?” Jane said, turning around to Ada who stood in the kitchen door. “Who carved that pumpkin?” she asked again, louder, facing Ada. “The one Nellie began?”

  Ada turned to look at the kitchen table, covered with newspapers and pumpkin seeds. Nellie’s jack-o’-lantern frowned at them all.

  Ada turned back to Jane and Nellie.

  “That’s how Brother James does the eyes. He loves the carving. That’s who carved that one. Brother James.”

  10

  Jane allowed her mother to drag her out of the house, but only because she didn’t want to upset Ada. If she wanted to return, and be welcomed, she had to remain calm and not frighten off the woman.

  “Start talking,” Jane said to Nellie. “I want the secret, the truth, the whole story. How could you have a cousin who lived less than twenty minutes away from us and not even tell me or Michael? Why in the world would you keep this a secret? What was the point? If I live to be as old as Ada, I will never understand you, I swear, Mom, I am—”

  “You’re one hell of a detective, aren’t you? Asking so many questions you don’t give me any time to answer them,” said Nellie. “Just hold on to your horses. Calm down and drive us out to Swanette’s and I’ll tell you.”

  Jane didn’t think she needed the “dispassionate remove” for Nellie. Her mother knew how to throw her off balance no matter how calm Jane might remain. She didn’t bother with a deep breath or a soothing tone. Instead, she started the car and waited.

  “My ma didn’t want us to know our cousins. She didn’t get along with her brother—he was James, too, but she called him ‘Jimmy.’ And she couldn’t stand Jimmy’s wife, Margueritte. That might be why they fought so hard—over Margueritte. I don’t know. Ma wouldn’t talk about it to us kids. She said they were crazy and their kids were crazy and she didn’t want me and Veronica playing out there. We did the bare necessities as she called it—we visited on their birthday sometimes because it was Halloween and they made a big deal out of it. Me and Veronica always wanted to go. They had caramel apples, for God’s sake, and about a million pumpkins. Uncle Jimmy grew them. He owned and farmed all the land around the house. Uncle Jimmy was okay, he’d hook up the hayrack to the tractor and take all us kids for a ride. And Aunt Margueritte was okay to us, too. She could cook—made candy and cakes and all kinds of fancy stuff our ma never made. I remember she’d take flowers from her garden and dip them in sugar somehow and decorate all her cakes and pies. But they never talked, Ma and Margueritte. Even as kids we noticed they never said a word to each other.

  “Ada and James were sort of strange kids. They didn’t look alike even though they were twins. Ada was nice and all, but she was an oddball. Always wearing dark glasses. Like now, I guess. Probably because she couldn’t hear very well, but in those days, they didn’t do a lot of testing. I still don’t know if she’s ever been to a doctor. I heard Ma tell my dad once that Ada needed help and it wasn’t right that because Margueritte didn’t believe in doctors Ada had to suffer. James was just mean. He was a nasty kid, except to Ada. He treated her like a pet. No, that’s not even right. He was mean to animals.”

  Jane pulled into a gas station on the outskirts of the small business district. After filling up the tank and running inside to pay and get a couple bottles of water, she got back in the car, handed one to her mother and nodded.

  “What?” asked Nellie.

  “Keep talking,” said Jane.

  “That’s it. That’s the story.”

  “I swear to God I will make you hitchhike back to Kankakee.”

  “What else is there to tell?” asked Nellie, opening up her water and taking a long drink.

  “You knew James was dead. That’s why you were giving me the eye when we went upstairs. What happened? And who pays the bills? How does she get around? She can’t hear well. I don’t think she sees all that well, either. Dark glasses—that’s why the lights are so dim. It doesn’t matter to her, she just knows the place by heart.”

  “Look, we didn’t know James was sick. Ada has a phone but never calls anybody, never answers it, probably can’t hear it. It was like she said. James told her what to do when he died. She made the call to the undertaker, I guess, whoever James had made his plans with, and he was taken away and cremated and returned to her before we even found out. That’s the right thing, you know. I want to be cremated, did I tell you that?”

  “A million times. So how’d you find out he died? Did she have a service?”

  According to Nellie, not only was there no service, there was not even a death notice in the paper. Edna, from the diner across the street, noticed that no one was mowing the lawn or watering the herb garden and just thought things looked weirder than usual, so she went over and banged on the door.

  “Ada told her that Jam
es was gone and Edna should call me and tell me. Lucky she did it, because she didn’t even realize that gone meant dead. She just figured he’d left Ada there alone. He’d go off and do odd jobs and Edna told me she thought he had been married for a while when he was young. I didn’t ask questions, I never wanted to know anything about that. I steered clear of Cousin James. Anyway, your dad and I drove out and saw her and she told us how Brother James had died and all, introduced us to the urn, just like she did today. I thought your dad was going to pass out,” said Nellie.

  “What about the rest? How does she live?”

  “Dad arranged to have all household bills sent to us. He pays her heat and electricity, which isn’t all that much. He found an account book that James had kept and saw that he had put money away in Ada’s name. Came from selling all the farmland around the house. Now Ada just owns the house, the lots on either side, and she owns the lot next to Edna’s—the parking lot for the café. Money’s enough to cover property tax for the next ten years if she lives that long. I send out groceries, they’re delivered once a month.”

  Jane smiled. So Nellie hadn’t just been snooping in the kitchen. She had been making a list.

  “What are you grinning about? It’s no big deal.”

  “It is a big deal. It’s a good thing to do. That’s why she was so happy to see you.”

  “Nope. She likes me. She always liked me. But it doesn’t have anything to do with groceries or bills. She doesn’t even know we do that.”

  Jane swung the car into Swanette’s long driveway.

  “Come on, Mom. She’s a little eccentric, but she’s not a complete simpleton. How does she think the bills are paid, who brings the food?”