Dead Ends

by JT Ellison

  “Spence,” Delta said, and he stilled his hand a moment, waiting to see if she was going to protest. “Tell the story about what happened here.”

  He sighed with anticipation. “Okay, I’ll tell you.” He twisted toward her, let his hand slide even higher to run his fingers along the soft skin at her neckline, easing his fingers in under the cloth while his other hand stretched around to her back, where he played with the dozen tiny, silk-covered buttons. “It’s about a boy and girl in love.”

  “Did the boy or girl live here?”

  “The girl. She was an only child, doted on. Her daddy bought her this car. Gave her everything she wanted.” Spence kissed her softly as he worked at the buttons. “But the boy was heading off to war and might not come back,” he said between kisses.

  “Oh no.”

  “He asked—” Spence was having a hard time kissing, working at the buttons, and telling the story at the same time. He dropped his hands down to Delta’s waist and slid her hips along the seat toward him until she was lying flat, and he eased himself into the gap along the back of the seat, his knee settling into the dip between her legs, lost in the sea of tulle. “He asked her to marry him, but there wasn’t time for a ceremony before he had to go fight. They wanted to show their love so—”

  “Her daddy didn’t like him,” Delta said.

  Spence pulled back a little, surprised at how sure she sounded.

  “Daddies don’t ever like boys,” she explained.

  “No.” Smiling, Spence stretched his arm down to the floorboard, searching for the bottom of her dress. “But the girl didn’t care. She was willing to give up everything for him.” His fingers played with the sheer hose at her ankle and along the backside of her calf. “She wanted to show the boy how much she loved him.”

  “And then the boy died. That’s sad.”

  Something didn’t sound right in her voice, but Spence’s body was raging with desire. He eased a hand up to unfasten his pants while he kissed the tender skin along the curve of her breasts.

  “Spence, wait.” Delta pulled at his face until he was looking at her.

  “I don’t want to wait, Delta.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “Let me show you how much I love you.”

  Delta stared into his eyes as if she were trying to find the truth.

  “I asked you to come with me, didn’t I? Show me how much you love me, and I’ll take you away from here,” he said.

  Something in her face changed, like watching a little girl turn into a woman all at once.

  “What do you want, Delta?” He was surprised to hear his voice shake.

  “I want you, Spence.” And she let him bury his face against her breasts as he shoved at her skirts and pulled her under him.

  Delta sighed. “He wasn’t a soldier, you know.”

  But Spence was too busy to hear.

  “He was just the wrong sort of boy,” Delta said, her voice cold like the December air, indifferent. “But the girl loved him anyway. So she gave herself to him. In this car. Her daddy had bought it for her, but not because she was doted on. He bought it to control her. His money, his car, his gas meant he could tell her what to do, where to go, and who she could love, or not.” There was a bite of bitterness in her tone now.

  But Spence didn’t hear it as he pulled her tightly against him. She arched her neck back to keep the pile of tulle from smothering her. She stared up at the stars through the spindly arms of the willow tree.

  “But her daddy caught them,” Delta said as she slid her hands out from her waist where they’d been trapped against Spence’s body. “And he shot the boy. Just here, in the backseat of this car. The daddy shot the boy in the head while his daughter was underneath him. Shot the boy she loved. She had bits of his brain on her face. Blood everywhere. It ruined her dress.”

  “What?” Spence asked. He’d reached his climax and collapsed on her chest.

  “The boy died.”

  “I didn’t think you knew the story,” Spence said, his voice loose and languid.

  “Do you know what happened after?” Delta asked. “Her daddy snatched her up out of the car and locked her away in this house. Painted her up like a whore and sat her in a rocking chair in front of the parlor window. Turned the lights on at night so folks could come jeer at her.”

  “Made her out to be a lesson to other girls who’d give away their virtue to the wrong sorts of boys,” Spence said. “That’s what my daddy told me.”

  The sharp, shrill cry of a mockingbird rang out through the cold air.

  “Do you know what Winona means?” Delta asked, her own voice soft and pliant again. “It’s an Indian word that means ‘first daughter.’ It’s why this place is called Winona Plantation—because the Indians brought their firstborn girls here to honor them. Their mamas would come, and they’d have initiation ceremonies when the girls were ready to become women. They anointed the girls and said blessings over them. Kinda funny, huh?”

  “Funny, how?” Spence sounded like he was almost asleep.

  “Funny that this was a place to honor daughters, and it’s the place where a daddy defiled one.”

  “She had it coming.”

  Delta looked over at the dark outline of the manor house. “You never asked me about my family, Spence.”

  “Why would I?”

  “You asked me to come away with you, but you don’t know if I’m the right sort of girl because you don’t know anything about my family.”

  “You were at the First Families Cotillion, so that tells me a lot about your family, and what we just did tells me all I need to know about what sort of girl you are.”

  The mockingbird raced through one bird call after another, frantic, as if trying to find its own song.

  “My mama came from the Lusks over at King’s Hill near Alva. Some folks tell stories about them. They’ve got a touch of oddness. Do you know them?” She waited a beat. “They aren’t a First Family, but my mama—she was determined to marry into one. So she said yes to James Blackstone, and he brought her to his family’s estate here in Willow Falls, and they had me.”

  “See, it’s what I was telling you earlier this evening. Some people are just lucky.” He gave a muffled laugh.

  “My daddy, he—”

  “I ain’t afraid of your daddy, sweetheart, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “No, Spence, you don’t have to worry about Daddy. He’s been dead a good little while now. See?”

  The lights at the front of the manor house sparked to life, and Spence spun around to look. The neglected gray stone walls were mottled with black and green mildew, stone shingles hung precariously along the eaves, but his eyes were drawn to the room at the right. A full bank of windows exposed the interior. Through the wavy glass, Spence could see gas lamps lit up along the walls. Empty shelves ran along one wall, cobwebs hanging in the gaping crevices. The room was painted a stark white. There was nothing in the room but a simple cot and an old rocking chair. There was someone in the chair—a man, it seemed, based on the size. Chunks of flesh hung flaccid against the skull, the jaw dropped and mouth gaping, loose and impotent. The rest of the body was shrouded in a black tuxedo, tails draping down from the seat and swaying as the chair moved gently back and forth.

  “I sat in that room for twenty years,” Delta whispered. “Twenty years’ worth of rocking. Twenty years Daddy would come in and paint my cheeks with Mama’s special rouge and turn the lights on. Twenty years of Mississippi’s most fortunate sons and finest daughters sneaking out here to jeer at me and call me a whore.” Her voice was icy with bitterness. “Now it’s his turn.”

  The front doors of the house opened, throwing light out onto the steps and up to the lintel over the entrance where there were words carved into the stone—Blackstone Manor.

  “I don’t understand,” Spence muttered.

  “See up there? The name? Blackstone? That’s the name of the people who lived here.” She spoke to him like
she was explaining something simple to a child. “That’s my daddy’s family. That’s my name, too. Delta Blackstone.”

  “But that can’t be,” he said. “You can’t be her. That was nearly thirty years ago, and you’re... you’re just a girl.”

  He spun back around to Delta. “Oh God!”

  There was blood everywhere, streaked all down her white tulle.

  She propped herself up on her elbows. “Don’t worry, Spence. It’s not mine.”

  He held her gaze, shaking his head as if he didn’t want to look, but his hands were already moving to his abdomen. He felt the sticky wetness there before he finally looked down to see the sliced flesh. He looked back at Delta.

  She was sliding a delicate little knife back through the opening of the glove at her wrist. The silver hilt glinted in the light. “The blade’s so fine you don’t even feel it.”

  Spence pushed himself back against the car. Blood poured down his gut into his pants, and slick, pink intestines pushed at the edges of the wound. He clamped his hand over them to keep them from spilling out.

  “It’s not my daddy you have to be afraid of, Spence. It’s me.” She pushed herself up to her knees. “And my mama.”

  Spence turned to look where she was looking. Just past his shoulder stood a woman in a wedding gown with a veil drawn over her face. Even in the pale light, it was easy to see that the dress was yellowed with age. She held out a small porcelain box with a fine, filigree peacock embedded in the top.

  “Thank you, Mama,” Delta said as she took the box. She wriggled the top loose and pressed it against the blood flowing from Spence’s gut until the box overflowed with red. “He’s going to make real pretty rouge, Mama.”

  Spence tried again to push himself up and out of the car, but he was so weak he couldn’t move more than a few inches, and his breathing was fast and shallow.

  Delta smiled down at where Spence had slumped into the floorboard. “You’re lucky, Spence—you’re my first.” She giggled at the look on his face. “My first time to do it all on my own. Mama’s always done the cutting before.”

  The sky was starting to turn pink at the far eastern edge.

  Delta leaned down and kissed Spence tenderly on the lips. “It’s almost time, lover,” she whispered. He moaned.

  “Did you know the winter solstice is a powerful time, Spence? Especially for people like my mama and me—all us Lusk girls, in fact. Mama said some folks used to call her and her sisters witches under their breath at church on Sundays. Nobody believes that anymore, though.” Delta dipped her finger in the box of blood and lifted it to her cheek. “Anyway, the earth gives us what we want if we ask in just the right way. Blood shed in the heat of passion, worn like a shield against time.” She smeared the blood in perfectly round circles at the apples of her cheeks, then she curled up against Spence on the floorboard, his head sagging on her shoulder.

  She started humming softly the tune to “Danny Boy,” but stopped, looking down on Spence’s chalky face.

  “I want you to know that I learned my lesson all those years ago about the wrong sorts of boys. Only fortunate sons for me now.” She kissed him on the top of the head and turned to look at her mama.

  “Aren’t I a lucky girl?”

  Stone Angels

  Laura Benedict

  Trewlove Hall is the last house I will ever see.

  The thought assaulted me with violent certainty as the chauffeured car made its slow way up the curving drive leading to Trewlove Hall, and I clutched the collar of my new spring coat closed to fight the sudden chill. The drive hugged the house’s elaborate gardens, winding through trees and around massive banks of riotous yellow forsythia and pink-tipped azalea buds. My panic felt strange and out of place among so much natural beauty. At the other end of the wide leather seat, my daughter, Theresa, gawped at both the garden and the charming statues of waist-high rabbits, foxes, geese, and raccoons scattered here and there. It was like a child’s wonderland. Traveling here was an adventure for her. Though Theresa was almost nine years old, it was only the second time she’d ridden in a car. The first time was three years earlier, when we’d ridden in the car following her father’s hearse to the soldiers’ cemetery, after he was killed in the Great War.

  Trewlove Hall, home to Mary Trewlove, my new employer, and her granddaughter, Lilith, sat nestled in the gently rolling land outside Carystown, Kentucky, only a six-hour train ride from our former home in Cincinnati. But I felt like we’d been transported a million miles and a lifetime away.

  “Mama, look. Horses! Did you know there would be horses? They’re like giants.” Theresa tapped on the window, indicating two huge gray Percherons grazing behind a distant fence.

  Before I could reply, Jerome, the grizzled, brusque man chauffeuring us from the train station, answered without turning around. “Those ain’t for riding, and they ain’t for playing with, either. They pull the mowers, and drag out stumps and the like. So don’t you go bothering them. They’d as soon step on a little thing like you and crush your head.”

  Insolence. There was a time in my life when such behavior would have thrown me into a pique, but I held my tongue. Theresa turned to me, her large, dark eyes as solemn as her father’s on our wedding day, waiting to see how I would respond. I shook my head, and she turned back to the window, silent. The shame of the job I was taking—working as a hired tutor for a child who was surely as spoiled as… well, as spoiled as the girl I’d been early in life—kept me silent as well. My pride chafed. I was the hired help now, and socially little better than the ill-bred Jerome, with his coarse hands and bullying words.

  Trewlove Hall was framed by tall, leafy trees, and a riot of brilliant garden blooms, but the house itself was a grim and dingy Tudor monstrosity out of a dime novel from the last century. The stone walls, where they weren’t covered with creeper vine, were streaked with weather and age, and the hall’s broad central building, which joined two steeply pitched wings, was crowned with an intricate pattern I couldn’t quite make out. Flowers, perhaps, and were those cherub faces in the stone foliage?

  Even now, I’m not certain. I spend little time outside of the house.

  Perhaps it was the late position of the sun, but the scarce mullioned windows reflected back the blue of the sky, making them opaque, and I gently squeezed Theresa’s shoulder, wanting to pull her closer as the house loomed, but she resisted.

  Little did I know in that moment that her pulling away was the first indication that I might lose her before the week was out.

  Something caught my eye as it darted among the sparse trees near the edge of the woods to the west of the house. It was too large and colorful to be an animal, unless the local deer were in the habit of wearing yellow dresses or cloaks. Whoever it was didn’t move like someone out for a pleasant afternoon walk. They seemed to be trying to hide.

  “Who is that?” I asked.

  Jerome grunted, and Theresa turned from her window. “What is it, Mama?”

  The yellow figure was gone.

  “Does Mrs. Trewlove take walks in the afternoon?”

  “Used to,” Jerome answered. “But she’s not so well now.”

  “It’s nothing,” I told Theresa, not wanting to explain. Had it been a person at all? “Maybe just a trick of the light.” How easy it was to lie to a child.

  “Well, aren’t you a precious thing?”

  Theresa gripped my hand tightly—or was it that I was gripping hers?—as we stood side by side on the portico steps. Behind us, Jerome was noisily liberating our trunks from their perch on the back of the car. I’d imagined us being let out at the imposing set of front doors, but the car had passed them without slowing and pulled into a carriage entry at the east side of the house. I wondered if it was a sign of our low position. We certainly were not guests.

  The woman smiling down at Theresa wore a starched apron over her simple black dress, and a white linen dust cap covered much of her nutmeg hair. Her broad hips stuck out on either side, b
ut her shoulders were narrow, giving her the shape of a pear. Her bright eyes, fixed on my Theresa, were friendly and warm. I was skeptical, but if such a pleasant woman lived in the house then maybe my first impression—that it was an unfriendly, forbidding place, indeed, possibly the last house I would ever see—was wrong. My dear husband, Allan, had often teased that I was overdramatic.

  “Cat got your tongue?” The woman grinned broadly, and I saw that her canine teeth were just that much narrower and longer than the others, indeed like a cat’s. She leaned down to give Theresa’s nose a familiar tweak.

  To my surprise Theresa smiled in response. She was a much sweeter child than I felt I deserved. “Mama is the new teacher. My name is Theresa—really Theresa Marie.”

  “My daughter is overexcited,” I said hurriedly. “I’m Susannah Ross. Mrs. Trewlove?”

  The woman reared back with unexpected laughter. Was she mad? Would she lean down and try to tweak my nose as well? “Lord, no! Wouldn’t Mrs. Trewlove have a laugh at that? Come inside, come inside.” She stepped back, indicating we should enter. “Jerome, Miss Susannah’s to be in the Blue Room in the main gallery in the front, and Miss Theresa’s in the east wing, the Bouquet Room, next to Miss Lilith.”

  As her words sank in, I realized I would be separated from Theresa for the first time in our lives. Always, she had slept in her small bed in the room next to ours. Allan and I would lie in our own bed and listen, smiling, as she sang to herself or told herself stories. The songs and stories had eventually stopped, but still, she was nearby. And now she wouldn’t be. Did I dare say something? But at least we were to have rooms in the main parts of the house, not in the servants’ quarters, and that was something.

  Without a word, Jerome lifted my larger trunk onto his shoulder, then picked up Theresa’s by a leather strap. Theresa and I followed the woman—who finally told us her name was Molly—into the house.

  The carriage entry led directly into a long dining room hung with medieval hunting tapestries, and then we entered the dim central hall. Captivated as a child, I marveled at room after magnificent room. Perhaps magnificent is too extravagant a word. They were stately rooms, filled with highly polished furniture, paintings, and precious bronzes and sculptures. Before we went up the stairs, Jerome huffing behind us, I noticed that the front doors, which were lacquered with shiny ebony paint, were barred with a substantial iron bolt.