The Homecoming

by Carsten Stroud

  No Kate.

  Thinking it over, Lemon thought maybe he’d just do a walk around the yard, see if there was any sign that Rainey had been there. If doing that gave him a chance to have a moment alone with Rainey, a kind of brotherly heart-to-heart that might involve a loving smack to the side of the head, maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Nick was his guardian, but he had to stay away from anything physical, any kind of rough discipline. Nick’s feelings about Rainey were too flammable.

  So Lemon climbed down out of the Suburban and walked up the block in the direction of the Teague house. He reached the bottom of the drive.

  And then he stopped.

  The house looked perfectly ordinary, a large stone mansion resting on a rolling lawn, surrounded by oaks and willows, a dappled afternoon light lying on it. The warm glow of old money was the expression that came to Lemon’s mind as he stood there looking up at it. But there was something on the big stone verandah that had never been there before. It was like a shadow, or at least a darker kind of light, and it was resting on the porch. Looking at it Lemon knew it wasn’t a shadow.

  It was a darkness.

  And it was aware of him.

  Lemon’s gut did a slow roll and the muscles all over his back and belly started to crawl. The shadow got larger, lengthening and spreading. It separated into two distinct shapes, and then into the figures of two large men.

  They were standing on the landing, staring down at him, not yet clearly defined figures, but men nevertheless, blurred and shimmering as if his eyes were watering, but solid enough. He shook his head and they came into focus.

  They both wore blue jeans and heavy black boots. Their big bellies pushed the white cotton of their shirts out like spinnakers and sagged down over their belt buckles. Although one had a shaved head and a black biker goatee and the other one was clean shaven, with shaggy blond hair, they had a family resemblance.

  Lemon had seen their pictures, a couple of mug shots, above the headline in the Niceville Register, the morning after the crash and the carnage at the Super Gee. Dwayne Bobby Shagreen and Douglas Loyal Shagreen, ex-Nightriders, wanted by the FBI, and until two days ago, lying dead and frozen in the back of a meat wagon at the State Police HQ lock yard outside Gracie.

  Lemon knew they weren’t really there, no more than Merle Zane had really been standing at the elevator in the hallway at Gracie when the door opened and they stood face-to-face and spoke to each other. Whatever these things were, they were fully present now, looking as solid as the stones they were standing on, arms limp at their sides, dull cow-like faces devoid of expression or feeling, staring back at him, waiting for him to come closer. He got his heart rate under control and stood his ground.

  “Why are you here?”

  The one with the long blond hair looked confused, and then he said, as if he had just recalled this, “We are here for Mr. Teague.”

  There was no edge or venom in his voice. No emotion at all. It was low and flat and soft. A faint Virginia accent.

  “Why?”

  “We take care of his needs.”

  “Where are you from?”

  The blond one looked puzzled again.

  “We see to Mr. Teague’s needs. There is no place to be from. There is no other place to be. We are here for Mr. Teague.”

  His lips were numb and his mouth was dry. There was a high-pitched buzz in Lemon’s ears. An artery in his neck was pulsing so intensely he could actually hear it.

  “Is Mr. Teague home?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want to talk to him.”

  “No.”

  There was a voice behind him, a woman’s voice.

  “Lemon? Are you okay?”

  He looked back and saw Kate. She was on the far side of the street, standing beside her Envoy. Beth was in the passenger seat, staring out at him.

  Lemon looked back to the landing. It was, of course, empty. Kate and Beth came up to him. Kate looked as if she had been crying, and Beth just looked shell-shocked.

  “Are you all right, Lemon?”

  “Yes. Sure, Kate. Of course. Why?”

  “You were talking to someone on the landing. At least you looked like you were. We called your name twice but you didn’t hear us. What were you doing?”

  Lemon looked back up at the landing, saw the Shagreens standing there. Obviously Kate wasn’t seeing them. He looked at Beth, who was simply looking back at him with the same puzzled expression. He shook his head.

  “I guess I was talking to myself.”

  “Is Rainey there?” Beth asked.

  “In the house?”

  Beth smiled at him.

  “No, Lemon. On the roof.”

  Lemon shook his head.

  “No. He’s not.”

  “You’ve already looked?” asked Kate.

  “Yes.”

  “You looked inside?”

  “Yes. He’s not there.”

  Please believe me, both of you.

  “Fine,” said Beth. “Now what do we do?”

  We get you both away from here, was his thought. What he said was “Are you hungry?”

  Kate looked surprised at the suggestion, as if being hungry had never occurred to her. She suddenly felt that she was starving.

  “I’m famished,” said Beth. “But what about Rainey?”

  “The Niceville cops have more cars than we do. They’ll find him. I’m hungry too. You two pick a place. I’ll follow you.”

  Beth and Kate walked back to the truck. All Lemon could think about was getting them into that Envoy and as far away from Cemetery Hill as possible.

  “How about Placido’s?” said Beth. “It’s just around the corner on Bluebottle Way. Can you do Italian?”

  “I know Placido’s. I’ll be right behind you.”

  “Okay,” she said. “See you in five.”

  Kate got into the Envoy, started it up, rolled down the window. She was looking past him at the Teague house.

  “When you were standing there, we thought it was like you were talking to somebody. Not yourself.”

  “Did you see anybody there?”

  Kate focused on him, a sharp, searching look.

  “Not that I could see.”

  “Beth, did you?”

  She looked uneasy.

  “Maybe something. Like a shadow, sort of.”

  “Look, let’s get out of here. I’ll see you at Placido’s.”

  Beth hesitated, glanced back up at the house, and then smiled.

  “We’ll talk about this over carpaccio. Okay?”

  “Sounds great.”

  They pulled away.

  He waited until they turned the corner onto Bluebottle, and then he walked back up to the bottom of the stone staircase.

  The dark light was still there, a pool of nothing that somehow made the sunlight weaker. Lemon put a foot on the first step and the dark light got more solid.

  “I’ll see you again,” he said, and walked back to his truck.

  Candleford House

  Gracie was only about forty miles away from Sallytown. Reed pulled into town as the sun was going down behind the Belfair Range. Gracie was a bigger place than Sallytown, but not by much. Since it was set in a kind of hollow between the eastern and western elevations of the Belfair Range, twilight came early and all the streetlights were on along Division Street, Gracie’s main drag.

  At the intersection of Division Street and Widows Lament, the center point of the town since all the streets radiated out in spokes the way they did in Washington and Paris, Reed saw the local branch of the First Third Bank, the scene of that spectacular robbery six months back.

  It was an old stone structure built to look like an Egyptian temple, which made the huge illuminated plastic bank signs stuck on the elegant old facade look as out of place as Ray-Ban sunglasses on a marble bust of Cicero.

  This Friday night Gracie was jumping as high as an old broad named Gracie can jump, which meant the crowd at T.G.I. Friday’s was
bulging the windows out and the line at the Ruby Tuesday had spilled out onto the sidewalk. Something involving penguins in 3-D was playing at the Chantilly Pantages, and Jubilation Park, Gracie’s village square, had a traveling carnival set up.

  The Tilt-A-Whirl was a spinning octagon of neon filled with shrieking teens, and the merry-go-round was putting out a calliope version of “The Skaters’ Waltz.” Got to love small-town America, Reed was thinking, as he rolled through the center of Gracie and out along Division Street. God bless the USA.

  Reed had driven by Candleford House many times while he was working patrol for State, but he had never paid too much attention to it.

  Now, as he brought the car to a stop in front of it, he gave it a closer look. It seemed just as he remembered it, a tall, forbidding gray stone building with two projecting tower-like bays on either side. Four stories high, with Norman turrets topping the towers. Money had been spent in the building of it. It had leaded casement windows, a central gallery with a couple of ornate pillars and a smaller upper balcony framed by carved stone arches. There was a huge wooden door on the street level, set in under a ponderous stone portico.

  Candleford House was stained by rain and wind and time and it looked as grim as death. Since it was a memory that Gracie devoutly wished to forget, it carried no historical plaque. It had been left to rot in a large weedy park behind a barrier of chain-link fencing. The local kids had done for all the leaded glass in the windows, except for the upper floors. The windows there were still reasonably intact. The last of the setting sun was reflected in the highest windows, which glittered gold like wolf eyes at night.

  There was a NO STOPPING sign right in front of the place, so Reed went farther along Division and found a 7-Eleven lot where he could leave the car. He got out with his Maglite, took his mid-sized bolt cutters and a pair of gloves out of the tailgate lockdown, keyed the car remote, and strolled back to Candleford House.

  It was getting colder these fall days and with the sun down there was a bite in the air. There were no houses or stores on this block, other than the 7-Eleven down the street. Live oaks crowded the street, looming and dense, shutting out the sky. Streetlamps burned a sickly yellow inside the branches. It was a lonely, gloomy, and unpleasant stretch. Why the city felt it had to put up a NO STOPPING sign was a mystery. The entire block was empty and there were no cars around.

  It was pretty obvious that Gracie people didn’t want to come anywhere near this place.

  He stood on the sidewalk in front of the sinister old pile, wondering what in the hell he was supposed to find inside this dead-eyed zombie of a building. Especially in the fading light, and that was assuming that he could even get inside the damn thing in the first place.

  Looking up at the facade, having it loom over him like a gigantic tombstone, Reed was finding it difficult to feel kindly towards Miss Beryl.

  But he’d said he would do it and he was a man who kept his word. He would get in there somehow, poke around, likely find sweet bugger all, get the hell out. Then he’d go back to T.G.I. Friday’s on the square for a couple of beers and a rib-eye steak, find himself a motel, call Kate and Nick, fill them in on what he had, including Miss Beryl’s conviction that Miles Teague was a cold-blooded murderer.

  Reed suspected she was right. He had never warmed to Miles, and his suicide when Rainey had been found alive had struck Reed as impossible to explain in any sane way.

  Miss Beryl’s theory answered a lot of questions and Nick and Kate would want to hear about it.

  Then he’d get himself a good night’s sleep, and maybe drive back up to Sallytown, check out the Gates of Gilead, and then stop by Miss Beryl’s place to fill her in on … whatever he had found.

  He did a slow walkabout along the perimeter of the fence. It was ten feet high and topped by razor wire that tilted inwards, as if it was there to stop whatever was inside from getting out.

  So climbing that was off the table.

  He went around to the back of the lot. There was a hinged gate here, chained and padlocked. He looked for alarms. There weren’t any. Nor did he see any power or phone lines running into the building. It stood there, dark and dead-eyed and silent.

  There was a glow in the evening sky that promised a moon later. He had no intention of being around long enough to need moonlight.

  He checked behind him, looked right and left, put his gloves on, and snapped the chain with his bolt cutters. The chain rattled to the ground and he pulled on the sagging gate. He had to lift it to move it, and it groaned as it came, but all he needed was a couple of feet.

  He slipped through the opening, walked across the big yard, which was mostly weeds and stones and broken glass. The back of the building had what looked like a cookshack attached to the main structure. The roof had fallen in, but it looked like a soft spot to probe.

  There was a slatted door hanging off a hinge. He jerked it away and the black hole of what had once been a summer kitchen lay before him. He flicked on the Maglite. It had a powerful halogen beam. He laid it on the interior and saw a stone floor littered with what was left of the roof beams. There was a door—open—at the back of the summer kitchen, and a flight of stone stairs that led upwards into the gloom. The place smelled of mold and seepage and rot.

  Great way to spend a Friday night, he thought, but he went in anyway. It was his intention to see if anything remained of an office or a registry, or a reception area, and his best bet was the main floor hallway. The stairs were marble, worn smooth by time, and he was surprised that no one had bothered to strip the place for its fixtures.

  He reached the main floor landing. It was like walking onto the deck of the Titanic after a hundred years at the bottom of the ocean. There was a huge central hallway with a checkered tile floor. The ceiling was lined with decorative tin tiles and a large chandelier, rusted and ruined, dominated the air space. Reed put his light up into the darkness and saw a kind of central atrium that went all the way up to a stained-glass roof.

  The atrium was lined with tall galleries on all four sides, supported by carved wooden pillars. There were four levels of galleries. They receded into the gloomy dark far above.

  The comparison with the Titanic—or at least pictures he had seen of its ballroom—was sharper than ever.

  There was a brown ruin to his right—what was left of a large oak counter, behind which stood a wall of pigeonholes for either keys or mail. Clearly the reception desk, as if Candleford House was a place where you checked in for a spa weekend. He walked over to it, his boots crunching on broken glass and years of plaster dust.

  The desk was barren, just a rotted-out pile of dead wood. The wall of pigeonholes was empty. There were no ruined ledgers lying around, no paper of any kind at all. There was a door to the right of the reception desk, with faded gold letters on it. PRIVATE. Reed honored that sign by booting the door open.

  The heavy wooden door boomed backwards and he put a light into the room. There was nothing in it, just an overhead dome light hanging from a chain, and rotted floorboards peeling up. Not finished flooring either. Just the rough planks of a subfloor. There was a row of windows along the back wall, and through their shattered glass he could see the lot, the chain-link fence, and down the street the blue glow of the 7-Eleven.

  If there had ever been anything in this room, it was taken out long ago. The same was probably true of every other room in the place.

  What the hell had Leah Searle seen here that got her killed? There was nothing here.

  The place was an empty shell.

  It held nothing but the smell of rot and plaster dust and mold. He wasn’t even getting the stink of rats or mice, and he had seen no roaches. No pigeon shit on the floors, no bats fluttering around the upper floors. “No rats no cats no wolverines,” as the song went.

  Which was, come to think of it, damned odd.

  Patrol cops spend a lot of time in ruined buildings, rousting homeless people, chasing felons, looking for lost pets. Reed had been in hun
dreds of them, and every last one of them was teeming with vermin of every stripe. They usually reeked of ammonia from bat droppings and there was always the murmuring ruffle of pigeons in the rafters.

  Candleford House was empty.

  And silent.

  Reed couldn’t hear traffic noises from outside, and that carnival a few blocks back was putting out enough bad music to drive dogs crazy for miles around. But inside here? Not a sound. It was like the place was holding its breath. When he moved across the floor even the crunching sound of his boots on the debris was muffled and dull.

  It struck Reed then that Candleford House wasn’t empty at all. It was packed full of silence, a thick fog of deafening silence.

  For the first time since he’d stepped inside this place, Reed felt his chest and neck get tight, and the skin on his back grew hot in some places and cold in others. He knew this feeling. This was fear.

  Of what? he thought.

  Of nothing, came the answer, out of an ancient place deep down in his limbic system.

  Nothing is in Candleford House.

  Nothing is in this hallway with you.

  Nothing is standing behind you.

  Reed pivoted, bringing his Beretta out, running the light around the main floor, and then shining it up into the dark shadows of the upper galleries.

  He saw … nothing.

  He shook himself, forced his body to relax.

  This was crazy. If nothing was what spooked Leah Searle, then this whole exercise was absurd.

  He decided he’d give the place a quick look, all four floors, room by room, do it right, and then he’d get out.

  He found the first staircase, tested it with his weight, and then went up it carefully, keeping his weight on the sides of each riser, not trusting the centers at all.

  He reached the first gallery. Each side had four large bedrooms, with gaping windows, and all sixteen rooms were empty. It took another hour to search all four floors, and his expectations were completely fulfilled. Nothing was in every room.

  Nothing filled the central atrium. Nothing was in the dining room, nothing was in the long-deserted spaces that might have been hospital wards. Nothing was in the tiny windowless rooms on the top floor, the ones with the heavy doors with the small iron-barred windows in them. Reed checked each and every one of them. At the end of the fourth-floor gallery, past a row of what could only be called cells, he saw an open door.