The Homecoming

by Carsten Stroud

  Anora stared into the mirror, seeing only herself and Talitha, embracing each other, and the sickroom a dim image behind them. And something else. In the farthest corner of the room she thought she could see a shape, standing in the shadows, a pretty young woman in a pale night shift.

  The woman looked familiar to her. Perhaps she was the ghost of a woman she had known, or would someday know. Or perhaps she was simply having visions. Her head filled with green light. If Talitha had not been holding her she would have fallen. Talitha’s body was as cold as hers was warm.

  Talitha kissed her on the temple.

  “Good-bye, Missus. I am sorry for what I done.”

  Anora tried to touch her, but there was a window of rippled glass between her and Talitha. She held up her hand against the mirror and Talitha lifted hers on the other side until their palms touched. Talitha spread her fingers out, covering Anora’s hand with her own. Anora could feel the chill in Talitha’s hand even through the mirror.

  “Are you coming with me?” Anora asked.

  Talitha shook her head.

  “No, Missus. I wish I might. I can’t.”

  “Yes you can. I forgive you. It’s not too late for you. You can go to the pastor at Plaquemine and confess. To a judge. You can … atone.”

  “Missus, I believe I done that already. For what I done to you, Mister London has killed me.”

  “Killed you?”

  “Yessum. Mister London has killed me with a rope down in the box maze and now I am hung in the jupiter willow with a note I never wrote pinned to my dress. Mister London, he don’t collect I never got my letters, but Second Samuel knows.”

  She paused for a moment, as if listening.

  “They calling for me now, Missus. My run is done. I am bound for unconsecrated ground, because I am a whore and a murderess. I only come to take you to the mirror. Remember me to Second Samuel, if you can. He was a fine daddy to me, and I am sorry I was such a bad daughter. If you see him one day, on your side, I beg you tell him so, for me.”

  Talitha took her hand away and stepped back from the mirror. She felt something lying at her feet. Anora’s body lay on the ground, a small dead thing. In the mirror there was only one reflection. Her own. Talitha lifted Anora’s body and carried it back to the daybed, laying it down softly. She lifted up the sheet and placed it over her, leaving her face uncovered. She arranged the body into a peaceful pose, twined the peridot rosary around Anora’s fingers.

  Then she picked up the candle, looked around the room one last time, saw Kate standing there, watching her. She touched her finger to her lips, and then blew the candle out.

  Down in the jupiter willow Talitha’s corpse turned slowly in the river wind, a crushed snake twisted around her neck, a note pinned to her dress.

  In the mirror hanging on the wall of the Jasmine Room, Anora Mercer stood looking at her own body lying on the daybed. Then she looked up at the young woman in the white slip and smiled at her.

  Anora turned away and walked down a winding lane between oaks and willows until she came to a sunlit clearing full of emerald green dragonflies. They fluttered and hummed around her, a vibrating cloud of shimmering green. She could feel the thrumming power of their wings.

  Through the cloud of dragonflies, as if through a mist of green light, she saw a tall house on a sun-dappled street lined with live oaks draped in Spanish moss. The house was pale cream stone and it had high sash windows and the interior was filled with a golden afternoon light that put a warm glow on the rooms and the furniture.

  A blond-haired boy in a navy coat and gray trousers was standing at the foot of the curved staircase that led up to the entrance. He had a rucksack in his hands, and he was standing with his head down, his long blond hair covering his face, as if he had not yet seen the woman waiting on the landing. Another boy, smaller, with curly brown hair, was standing beside him, their heads together, as if conspiring at something. The woman on the landing had shining black hair held back by a silver pin. She was smiling down at the boys. The woman looked like her, so much alike they could almost be sisters. The woman on the landing glanced up, saw Anora there, and raised her hand.

  Anora recognized her. She was the young woman in the white slip, standing in the shadows of the Jasmine Room. Anora tried to wave back, but the vision turned into a dazzle of green light and the dragonflies took her away.

  In his empty bed London Teague lay awake and stared at the ceiling, thinking of the girl in the jupiter willow, sick with dread of the morning. The lantern on the river landing glimmered in the dark. Beyond it the Mississippi rolled down to the Gulf of Mexico, down to the Civil War, down to the future, leaving Hy Brasail Plantation and all her people far behind in the moonless southern night.

  Sunlight streaming in through the gauze curtain of her bedroom woke Kate up. She glanced at the bedside clock. It was almost seven. Nick was already out of bed. She could hear him in the shower. The smell of bacon and eggs came up the stairwell, and children’s voices came with it, Axel and Hannah. It sounded as if they were talking to Eufaula, the ethereal young girl who came each weekday to cook and care for the house.

  Kate pulled the covers back and slipped out of bed. She went to the window and looked down into the yard, seeing the sunlight on the flowers and the green shadows at the bottom of the yard, where the pines and oaks crowded up against the hill. She could see the water bubbling and frothing along in the creek that ran through the little forest there.

  She realized that she was looking for hoofprints on the lawn, and it came to her that she had dreamed a strange dream the night before, about Hy Brasail Plantation and the people who had lived and died there. She could feel the details slipping away and she fought to keep them in her mind. She felt it was very important to remember.

  When Nick came out of the shower Kate was sitting at her desk, still in her nightgown, writing in a notebook, head down, fixed and concentrated. She didn’t look up when he kissed her on the back of her neck. She sighed with pleasure, but she kept on writing. He didn’t ask her what she was writing, and she didn’t tell him. She didn’t want to tell him that she was writing about a dream and the dream was about the Teague family, and it wasn’t a good dream at all.

  Nick left her there and went in to dress.

  It was Monday morning, and Niceville was waiting for them all.

  Six Months Later

  Three Men in a Federal Prison Come Up with a Simple Plan

  Leavenworth Prison, a gray stone temple under a match-head sun far off on the Great Plains of the American Heartland: the General Population Common Room was steamy and hot and packed with heavyweight cons. The low-ceilinged windowless space stank of sweat and testosterone and the ammonia reek of potato-peel screech.

  Although these guys were all seasoned cons, every man in the room was staying away from the three men on the battered green vinyl couch in the middle of the common room.

  The men, two of them thick as old buffalos, slab-sided and weathered, and one a thin, graying, wispy man who looked impossibly ancient, were paying close attention to a CNN newsreel playing on the big flat-screen bolted to the wall.

  The screen was covered with chicken wire but the men—Mario La Motta, Desi Munoz, and Julie Spahn—could clearly see the heavy-muscled bald-headed guy with the biker goatee being perp-walked from an EMT vehicle by a couple of paramedics. Two Deputy U.S. Marshals were flanking the medics, and a guy who was obviously a plainclothes cop was walking along behind them.

  They’re walking this guy up the marble steps of the county courthouse in this small southern U.S. town that the CNN banner was calling Niceville.

  The perp was wearing a bright red jumpsuit and flip-flop sandals. His ankles were chained and he’s got his cuffed hands linked to a steel ring on a wide leather belt at his waist. The belt, for obvious reasons, buckles in the back.

  The Deputy U.S. Marshals—a heavy-bodied black woman with flat gray eyes and this gigantic white guy with a red face and long blond hair do
wn to his shoulders—are looking tight and worried. So does the cop, a sharp-planed guy with salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a navy blue suit, a white shirt open at the collar. He has a large stainless-steel revolver in a belt holster, from what they could see probably a Colt Python. He had a gold oval badge clipped to his belt. He looked straight ahead at the backs of the two marshals. The expression on his face was flat and he had shark eyes for the media crowd.

  The Deputy U.S. Marshals were bulling through the press crowd like a couple of NFL linemen, the detective in the blue suit following in their wake.

  The press were pressing in all around—why they’re called the Press—shoving mikes into faces, shouting inane questions, clutching at sleeves and shoulders. One big guy in a Banana Republic safari jacket stuck a fat furry mike with a LIVE EYE 7 logo on it into the face of the detective in the blue suit, striking him a glancing blow on the cheekbone. There was a quick flurry of movement—the camera jerked and the scene goes chaotic—it steadied and the man in the safari jacket was lying on his back at the bottom of the stairs, arms and legs waving like an overturned beetle.

  The CNN camera zoomed in on him, and then panned back up to the blue-suited cop, who has already turned away. The rest of the media crowd pulled back a few feet.

  The U.S. Marshals, who saw nothing of this, and if they had would have enjoyed it immensely, got the perp to the top of the stairs, where the prisoner somehow managed to break away and look back down at the crowd on the steps, his face red and his mouth bent into a nasty snarl, and now he’s yelling something which La Motta and Munoz and Spahn can’t hear because of all the noise in the common room.

  “That’s him,” said La Motta, pointing a fat pink finger at the screen. “That’s The Fuckhead,” giving it the capital letters.

  La Motta’s voice sounds like it’s coming from the bottom of a drainage ditch. He’s got thick black hair which he combs straight back and waxes down with Bed Head. Since he’s carrying three hundred pounds of muscle and fat on a frame built for maybe one-eighty, this makes him look like a walrus but nobody has ever told him this.

  “Yah think?” asked Munoz, being sarcastic, because there’s no fucking way any of them is ever gonna forget The Fuckhead. Desi Munoz is as bald as a trailer hitch and has bushy black eyebrows that he combs straight up like he’s hoping one day they’ll be long enough to start looking like hair.

  “Byron Deitz. In the freaking flesh.”

  “What’s going on this time?” asked Julie Spahn.

  They’d been following the Byron Deitz saga ever since the spring, when the media story about the First Third robbery and his connection to it had first broken.

  “They’re taking him to another one a those fucking jurisdiction hearings. The Feds want him remanded to D.C. to face that espionage beef. Local guys want him to stay. They’re saying he’s got a heart condition—that’s why the EMT guys are there—Feds think it’s bullshit and they want his ass in D.C. Deitz is saying he knows who really did the bank, but he’s not gonna tell until the Feds drop the spy thing. It’s what you call a stalemate.”

  “They ever get the money back?”

  “Not so far,” said Munoz. “Still out there somewhere. Fucking millions, floating around. Not a sign of it in six fucking months.”

  “Who’s the cop in the blue suit?” asked La Motta. “Looks like a nasty piece of work.”

  “Onna crawl there,” said Munoz. “At the bottom.”

  La Motta peered at the words streaming along the banner at the bottom of the screen.

  FOX NEWS REPORTER ASSAULTED BY LOCAL CID DETECTIVE AT REMAND HEARING FOR COP KILLER SPY

  “What the fuck is ‘local cee eye dee’?”

  “Criminal Investigation Division. Bigger than the local cops but smaller than the state investigation guys. Cover maybe a buncha counties and shit.”

  La Motta didn’t get it.

  “What’s a local CID guy doing on the perp walk?”

  “Cop’s name is Nick Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh is Deitz’s brother-in-law,” said Munoz. “Deitz married a chick named Beth Walker, she’s older sister to Kavanaugh’s wife. I guess they figure Kavanaugh can get Deitz to talk—you know, family and all that shit. Ain’t working so far.”

  “How do you know this shit?”

  “I asked the block boss. Swanson. He owes us.”

  “No shit. Where’d he get it?”

  “He gargled it onna web.”

  La Motta thought this over.

  “Maybe this cop’s a way in to Deitz?”

  “Maybe,” said Munoz, looking doubtful. “Looks like a tough nut. You could crack a tooth on guys like that. Swanson says the guy used to be a war hero, got a shitload of medals. Was inna Special Forces, over there in Raghead-istan. I dunno. Maybe the wife or the sister would be easier.”

  La Motta nodded, went quiet.

  Spahn pointed at the screen.

  “This jerkwater town—what is it again?”

  “Niceville,” said Munoz, smiling. “It’s down inna southeast, few miles outta Cap City.”

  “We got any people in this shithole?” asked La Motta.

  “In Niceville?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not yet. But we gotta do something about Deitz, that’s for sure. Soon as we get out.”

  “Nobody’s forgetting that,” said Spahn, smoothing him down.

  “We’re just sitting here, our thumbs up our asses. Be good if we had a guy down there now, do some advance work for us. Get the lay of the land.”

  Spahn grinned.

  “The lay of the land? Wasn’t that your wife?”

  “Fucking funny, Julie.”

  La Motta went inside for a bit, remembering what Deitz had done to them, came back, shaking his head. They all remembered it just fine. They had been remembering it every day for eighteen hundred and forty-seven days. They’d be out soon. Fucking Byron Deitz wasn’t going to have that long to wish he had never fucked with them. Maybe eighteen hours. Maybe less.

  “So they still didn’t find the money yet?” Spahn wanted to know. “The shit Deitz stole?”

  La Motta and Munoz shook their heads.

  “Not yet,” said La Motta. “Swanson says it’s still out there. Six fucking months. That means it’s hidden pretty good. I figure Deitz is gonna sit on it until he gets out. Then he cashes in.”

  “Three million bucks, rotting inna storage locker somewhere,” said Munoz, shaking his head. “Money rots, you know, less you keep it in a dry place. Remember what it was like, trying to keep all that money in fucking New Orleans?”

  “Or it’s inna basement somewhere, fucking rats making nests outta it,” said La Motta.

  A pause, while they all thought about the money.

  Julie Spahn had the last word on it.

  “That fucking money is ours.”

  A House by the Side of the Road

  A sunlit fall afternoon in the Garrison Hills section of Niceville. Kate was waiting for Rainey Teague and Axel Deitz to come home from Regiopolis Prep. She did this whenever she could, waited on the stairway like this, so Rainey and Axel would see her standing there when they turned the corner. Both boys needed to see someone waiting for them.

  Axel’s mother was working from Mondays to Fridays down in Cap City, as a civilian employee of the FBI, a job engineered for her by Boonie Hackendorff, the Special Agent in Charge and a family friend. Beth’s daughter, Hannah, just turned five, spent the week in Cap City with her mother, at a day care facility maintained for FBI staff. Beth and Hannah made it home on weekends.

  Their father was still in Twin Counties Correctional, awaiting the outcome of a long and complicated federal appeal demanding that he be remanded to Washington, D.C., to face a charge that he had conspired to sell national defense information to a foreign nation, specifically China. Apparently the Chinese government had taken the view that the death of their people was an act of aggression on the part of the U.S. intelligence agencies.

  The matter was being
fought out in various jurisdictions, from the State Department and Justice all the way down to the screamers on talk radio. Kate had followed the ins and outs of the case. She felt it could go either way. Byron might get sent to Cap City for a trial, or he could end up on a plane to Beijing, wrapped in heavy chains.

  As for Rainey, his father, Miles, was lying stiff, cold, and dead in the white Greek Revival temple that was the Teague family crypt in the New Hill section of Niceville’s Confederate Cemetery. Miles was on the second shelf from the top, just below an ancestor named Jubal Teague, and across the way from Jubal’s brother, Tyree Teague. Miles had a small mahogany box tucked under his right hand that contained what little they could find of his head.

  Jubal and Tyree were the sons of the infamous London Teague. He wasn’t there. No one knew where London Teague’s body was. No one cared. He was rumored to have died of syphilis in a brothel in Baton Rouge, or possibly it was Biloxi, a bitter old man given to gin and violence.

  London’s son Jubal seemed to have lived an honorable life, serving with distinction as a Confederate cavalry officer during the Civil War, the same war that saw his brother, Tyree, cut down by Union grapeshot at Front Royal.

  Jubal Teague went on to become the father of a deeply unpleasant man named Abel Teague. Deeply unpleasant men seemed to reappear in the Teague line fairly often. Like his grandfather London’s, Abel Teague’s body was not in the family crypt either, for roughly the same reasons.

  Kate had undertaken an informal study of the Teague line, keeping her interest a secret from Nick, whose instinctive unease around Rainey had, over time, receded, or had appeared to recede. She had no desire to have that unease flare up again. So here she was, standing on the landing, waiting for the last of the Teagues to come down Beauregard Lane. And there they were.