The Homecoming

by Carsten Stroud

  Behind the glow of the roundabout, Tallulah’s Wall loomed up into darkness, except for a small diadem of lights that marked the landing far above.

  Lemon parked his pickup beside the trolley car and tapped on the driver’s window. She looked him over more closely—a pretty young woman with great bones—hesitated, and then powered her window down a crack, because not all handsome young guys with sea green eyes and a piratical air were nice people.

  “Yes sir. How can I help you?”

  “I’m here looking for a young kid, looks about twelve, long blond hair, big brown eyes—”

  “Like a cartoon chipmunk. Regiopolis kid. He was with another kid from that school, younger, brown hair, also has eyes like one of those Disney chipmunks?”

  “Yes. That’s right. Rainey Teague and Axel Deitz.”

  “Deitz? Any relation to the guy just got popped over at the Galleria?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Oh dear. I should have done something about them. They never got home?”

  “Axel got home two hours ago. Called a cab from here and got picked up, but Rainey didn’t get in the cab. And he’s not home yet.”

  “They spent almost my entire shift riding back and forth between here and the Greyhound Bus Station downtown. I was thinking about calling them in to the local patrol, you know, they had that runaway look, but they both got off here at around nine. I asked them if everything was okay, and they said they had been skipping school but now they were going home. I figured they lived up here on The Chase. God, I wish I hadn’t done that.”

  “My name’s Lemon Featherlight. Can I ask you—”

  “Doris Godwin.”

  “Miss Godwin—”

  “Doris—”

  “Doris. I’m Lemon—”

  “You an Indian?”

  “Mayaimi. They named Miami after us.”

  “I’m part Cherokee.”

  She rolled the window down, offered her hand, and Lemon shook it. It was dry and strong, and she smelled of eucalyptus oil.

  “I think I know where he might be,” she said. “Last I saw of him, he was staring up at the top of Tallulah’s Wall. Like he was thinking—”

  “His friend said he went up those stairs.”

  She paused, looked at him.

  “I guess you’re thinking about going up there to look for him, aren’t you?”

  “I have to.”

  She shook her head.

  “Crater Sink is up there. That’s been a bad place for as long as my people can remember. We named this wall, long way back, after the thing that lived up there. She’s still there, Lemon.”

  “I know. I’ve heard about her too. But I still have to go.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, thanks, Doris.”

  She looked at him for a while, and then she picked up her radio.

  “Central, this is car thirty. I’m going to be ten-seven for a bit. I got a civilian here, lost his kid. Gonna go look for him.”

  “Doris, you got a missing kid, call the cops.”

  A female voice, older.

  “Not gone long enough for the cops, June. I’ll be right back—”

  “You got your cell with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Take a picture of this parent and e-mail it to me. Before you leave the unit.”

  Doris glanced at Lemon.

  “You mind?”

  “No. Please do.”

  Doris lifted her iPhone, snapped three shots, pressed CONTACTS, and hit SEND.

  “I got them … Okay, I see what you mean. But you be careful now. What’s this guy’s name?”

  “Lemon Featherlight. He’s a Mayaimi Indian.”

  “He’s a hunka-hunka, if you ask me. Take your radio. Be careful. I’m gonna run his name. I don’t hear from you in ten, I’m calling this in.”

  Doris got out of the trolley, used a remote to lock it up, leaving the interior lights on.

  “Okay, Lemon. Let’s do this.”

  And they climbed that staircase. They were both breathing raggedly when they reached the top. Niceville glittered far below, and the solar lights marked a winding path off into the old forest. A moon was rising over the southwest horizon. They turned to face the pathway. The trees were motionless and towering. They blocked out the stars.

  Neither of them said anything.

  “Call him,” said Doris.

  “Rainey. It’s Lemon. Rainey?”

  His voice got swallowed up by the silence. It was as if he’d spoken into a ball of cotton. Lemon sighed, put his foot on the path, and took a step, and then another. Doris followed close behind. About fifty yards in, they found Rainey.

  Lemon took one look at him, and got on his cell. There was no signal. Doris, seeing this, pulled out her radio, kneeling beside Rainey’s body, touching a finger to his throat.

  “June, this is Doris.”

  “Doris—you okay?”

  “We’re at the top of the wall. We found the kid. It looks like he’s in shock. We’re going to need the EMT guys.”

  “I’ll call 911. Stay there.”

  Lemon was kneeling beside Rainey. Doris tried her iPhone. No signal either. And now there was a kind of vibration in the air all around, rising and falling, as if something immense was out there in the dark, breathing. It chilled her blood.

  Doris stood up, took out her iPhone, and snapped off a series of pictures, her flash strobing in the dark, turning in a full circle, shooting as she turned.

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “There’s something out there.”

  “Yes. There is. We’re getting him out of here.”

  Lemon picked the boy up in his arms and strode quickly along the path toward the staircase landing. Doris followed, stopping every few feet to take another series of flash pictures. They were at the stairs now and going down as fast as they could, Lemon cradling the kid in his arms. There were flashing lights at the bottom of the stairs, blue and red and white. Halfway down they met the firemen and the medics, coming up fast.

  A Trick of the Dark

  That night, Thursday night, after Rainey had been released by the medics and brought home by Lemon Featherlight, Nick and Kate made Rainey a late-night bowl of soup. Beth and Axel and Hannah were in bed, but Rainey wasn’t.

  Not yet.

  And it was long after midnight.

  Rainey understood that this had something to do with the trouble he and Axel had gotten into. He had heard Nick and Kate talking in the living room, about Patton’s Hard and Lieutenant Sutter, Nick’s boss, and about Judge Theodore Monroe, the guy who had given Rainey to Kate in the first place.

  None of it sounded good to him.

  From the way they were sitting, not really looking at each other, and saying things in that way that grown-ups had when they wanted to talk about stuff that involved you without giving you a part in the conversation, Rainey knew something big was headed his way, and it wasn’t anything good.

  By the end of the snack, in spite of their best efforts, Rainey had begun to suspect that the cops had found Alice Bayer’s body in the Tulip and that tomorrow morning he wasn’t going to school because Kate was taking him to see Dr. Lakshmi, the brain doctor who had looked after him when he was in the coma.

  From what Nick and Kate were saying, and not saying, Rainey understood that going to Dr. Lakshmi was supposed to help him with the cops. Rainey was pretty sure that meant something like what they called an “insanity plea” on all those cop shows he watched.

  As far as he could figure it, an insanity plea meant that Kate and Nick were planning on sending him to a crazy farm.

  Ordinarily Rainey, being just a kid, would have handled this by screaming his guts out and crying and weeping and begging.

  But now he had this new thing going on inside him, this squeaky scratchy buzzy insect voice that had come to live in his head.

  Rainey had tried to ask this new thing if it had a name—it felt like it was in him but not p
art of him—but all he was getting was nothing and then a sort of quick sharp pin-stick in his skull as if he had been stung by a bee.

  Rainey didn’t think this buzzy stingy thing in his head was a … a kind thing. He didn’t think it was a very nice thing at all.

  To Rainey it seemed like what he had in his brain was like an earwig or a snake, and that thought scared him.

  Like what if it had earwig babies inside his brain and then those earwig babies had earwig babies and they all started to eat his brain from the inside out and what if one day while he was having breakfast or playing with Axel and one of the earwig babies crawled out of his ear or out of his mouth and everybody could see it—

  These were scary thoughts and part of him felt he ought to tell Nick and Kate about it …

  But …

  But whatever it was inside his brain it had words all mixed up inside the buzzing and the clicking and the words were kind of helpful when it came to thinking about what to do in this … situation … he was in.

  Right now it was saying say nothing say nothing these people are not your friends say nothing wait, which Rainey took to mean not to do anything right now, to keep still and quiet and wait and see.

  So he was eating his dinner—even the peas—and keeping his head down while Nick and Kate talked over it.

  From the tone and not the words Rainey figured that while Kate was more or less on his side, Nick was not. For one thing, Nick was usually a smiley kind of guy, especially when Rainey and Axel and Hannah were around, but tonight he wasn’t even looking at Rainey, other than those times when Rainey wasn’t looking at him and he’d look up and Nick would be watching him—studying him—with those pale cop eyes.

  So the thing in his head—he had to call it something—we are no thing—was telling him lay low but keep your head because tonight is a big night.

  Need to name this thing, Rainey was thinking and after a lot of buzzing the name came to him—we are Cain call us Cain so that was how it got its name and after that Rainey felt less like it was an earwig or a snake and more like it was just a kind of ghost in his head.

  So that was a little better.

  Not okay, but better than earwigs.

  After the snack he got handed around for hugs and kisses—as fake as Harry Potter’s glasses—and sent upstairs to have a shower and get ready for bed because “tomorrow was going to be a big day.”

  So that’s what he did, and it was almost two in the morning, and now he was standing in the shower and letting the warmth pour down on him.

  The part of him that was still a kid was glad that Axel was safe and that although he was in pretty big trouble about Alice Bayer, he was still just a kid and what could they do to a kid anyway, no matter what had happened to some old lady?

  This was the part of him that wasn’t Cain because Cain was talking to Rainey about the mirror.

  Cain really wanted to see the mirror.

  The idea that Cain wanted to see that mirror again and the belief—amazingly strong—that the mirror was not far away from where you are now—became impossible to put aside.

  He reached up and shut the shower off and stepped out into the fog of his own bathroom. The mirror in here was coated with mist so all he could see of himself was a slender pink cloud.

  He took a large soft towel off the rack—the rack was heated, so the towel was warm, a pleasant thing to wrap around your body after such a cold night. He dried himself off and put on his big white terry-cloth robe—it was actually one of Kate’s, who was about his size—and he stepped out into the upstairs hallway.

  He went, barefoot, to the top of the stairs and listened. He could hear Kate working in the kitchen and there was music coming from the downstairs study where Nick had his home office. Nick was in there doing his detective thing, and Kate was cleaning up after dinner. Rainey didn’t know much about the kind of music Kate liked and this was a tune he didn’t recognize at—

  it’s in the linen closet at the back it’s—

  all but it had a lot of strings and sounded like home used to sound when his mother was still—

  wrapped in a blue blanket go look at it—

  alive. Part of him felt ashamed that he had lied to Kate because all she was really trying to do was take care of him—

  now—

  and here he was playing mean tricks on her and lying to her and staying out all hours—

  now go now go now—

  Cain was getting screechier and when she did that she could really make Rainey’s head hurt, like his skull was full of needles, so Rainey turned around and walked back up the hall past the door to his own bedroom and past the door that led into Kate and Nick’s room.

  There was a long side hall that led back to the guest room and Kate’s office, which she had set up in a kind of sunroom that opened out onto a wide gallery with a roof made of lacy black wrought iron and railings that looked like vines.

  The linen closet, actually more of a walk-in supply closet and storage room, was at the far end of the side hall, which had a soft Oriental carpet runner in green and white flowers and the walls were painted a warm yellow like sunlight and had oil paintings of Savannah and Marietta and Sallytown and old Niceville all along both walls.

  The hall was dimly lit with a series of ceiling spots that cast pools of warm light onto the carpet. The door to the linen closet had a special light shining on it because it was really sort of a painting all by itself.

  It wasn’t very big and looked really old, kind of homemade. It was made of thin slats of cedar held together in a big wood frame. The entire door was painted a soft, warm yellow that matched the yellow of the walls, but on top of the yellow paint were all these white star-shaped flowers hanging from these curling green vines.

  The vines and the flowers covered the entire door right to the edges and looked as if they had at one time been part of something much larger, maybe a whole room that was painted like that.

  The paint had faded a bit and the cedar boards were all warped and cracked, but you could still make out the tiny white flowers and the green vines.

  Kate had told him that the flowers were jasmine and that the door had been painted a long time ago, by an artist from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for a relative of hers whose name was Anora Mercer, and it had originally been part of an entire room called the Jasmine Room.

  According to Kate, the Jasmine Room had been one of the rooms in a big plantation home called Hy Brasail, a huge estate in southern Louisiana that had been built right on the banks of the Mississippi River, and was owned by a distant relative of Rainey’s named London Teague.

  Rainey noticed that when Kate started talking about London Teague her voice went sort of funny and she moved past him pretty fast. He didn’t know—couldn’t have known—that, prior to a powerful dream she’d had six months ago, the story about the Jasmine Room had just been some old fairy tale that her mother used to tell. After the dream Kate knew that the Jasmine Room had also been the scene of a murder. But she kept the boards anyway.

  Rainey had asked Kate if the plantation was still around but she had shaken her head sadly and said no that it hadn’t been a happy place and it had been bombarded by Union gunboats as they came down the Mississippi in the final year of the Civil War. The door was one of the few things that the people were able to salvage out of the wreckage and it had been brought to Niceville by a freed slave who had come to spend his last years in Savannah with the Gwinnett family.

  Rainey had asked why the plantation was called Hy Brasail—which was a funny name—and Kate had said it was from an old Irish poem and she closed her eyes and recited the poem, which had stayed with him for a while, but now he only remembered the last line, which was …

  and he died on the waters, away, far away

  Rainey thought it was weird to name a plantation after something as sad as that last line and as he gathered his courage together and reached out for the doorknob he wondered what had happened to London Teague that had mad
e his name so difficult for Kate to speak out loud and was there a warning in it for him too.

  But he opened the door anyway.

  Everything was cleaned up and Kate was sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of wine and a mind full of white noise, listening to Nick talk on the phone in his office—it sounded like he was talking to Lemon—when she realized that Rainey had not come down after his shower.

  She walked to the foot of the stairs and listened, but the rushing sound that the shower in Rainey’s bathroom always made was absent.

  Thinking that he might have fallen asleep on his bed, she came up the stairs quietly, barefoot on the soft cream-colored carpeting, making no sound.

  She reached the second floor and looked down the main hall. The door to Rainey’s room was open and although his clothes lay scattered on the floor the bed was untouched. His bathroom was still foggy from the shower but Rainey wasn’t there either.

  Some faint ripple of concern kept her from calling out his name as she passed by their own bedroom, glancing in to see if Rainey had gone in there. But she could feel the emptiness of the bedroom and the bathroom door was open, the lights off, the suite of rooms dim and silent and empty, their big four-poster a shadow in the light from the streetlamp.

  The mirror.

  Kate came down to the turn into the second hall and saw Rainey at once, a bent figure hunched over on the floor of the linen closet, his back to the hall, his head lowered, as if he had something in his lap and was staring down at it.

  Kate saw the glint of gold frame at his sides and knew at once what Rainey had done.

  She came softly down the hall, not wishing to frighten him, her chest cold and her throat tight, hardly breathing. Rainey was motionless on the floor of the closet, although the whisper of Kate’s bare feet must have been loud enough for him to hear. If Rainey could still hear.

  She reached him, hesitated, knelt down behind him, and touched his shoulder. His head came up and he began to turn around, bringing the mirror with him. Kate pulled back when she saw his face, because the expression in it was nothing she had ever seen there before—shock, fear—anger?