The Good House

by Tananarive Due

  Angela’s cold-burn was back, this time at full strength, locking her arm. Without realizing it, Angela was holding the edge of the kitchen counter for support. Mrs. Everly slowly sank down until she was sitting atop one of the bar-stools, her eyes rapt.

  Angela didn’t want to hear any more. But she couldn’t open her mouth to say so.

  “Somehow, through all that ruckus, Red John started drumming and Mrs. T’saint went to chanting. He said she became like a crazy woman, the way she acted. Like she wasn’t herself at all. Her voice sounded different, louder and coarser than her voice was, or any woman’s voice. Grandpa decided right then and there he’d lived to witness the Apocalypse. All he could think about then was ways to try to make himself right with God, apologizing for every sin he’d ever committed, going back to boyhood. But after a time, he said, the mud stopped flinging. The child in the tub stopped grinning and started crying. And your grandmother was on the bathroom floor on all fours, panting like a dog. Tears streaming from her eyes. And she said, ‘The child is well.’ It was done. But itwasn’t done. I’m just not sure if I should say the next part or not, Angie.” Liza’s eyes were red. She’d told her story with a passion Angela had mistaken for enthusiasm, but she looked worn out.

  “Go on, Liza,” Angela said.

  Liza blinked, and tears appeared. “Your mother, Dominique, wasn’t in the house when Grandpa and the others came. She was about eight years old then, and she was at church, at a special program. Itwas Independence Day, because that was what the program was about. Red John had taken her there, and they hadn’t picked her up yet. But before Grandpa and Mr. Booth could gather up the child they’d brought, someone came knocking on the door. Grandpa said his blood went watery as soon as he heard the knock, because it wasn’t the way someone knocks when they’re coming to call. It’s the sort of knock when there’s bad news.

  “It was someone from the church, one of the Sunday school teachers. Grandpa said the man looked like he’d seen his own special version of Hell that day, too. It was Fenton Graybold, if I remember right, Rob Graybold’s grandfather. He’d run all the way from town to tell Mrs. T’saint and Red John something was wrong with Dominique. She’d been sitting up in class singing with everyone one moment, and then she’d clapped her hands over her ears and started screaming like she was trying to raise the dead. Nobody could calm her down and she wouldn’t let anybody touch her, so Fenton Graybold ran a mile to tell Mrs. T’saint and Red John to come fetch her. Grandpa said Mr. Booth never had a day’s trouble from his child after that, but Dominique was never right in the head since. He said it was as if…” But Liza didn’t finish, sighing. She looked at Angela apologetically, emerging from her spell. “It’s an old story. I shouldn’t have brought up that last part about your mom.”

  Angela’s jaw trembled. “What did your grandfather say, Liza? He said it was as if…what?”

  This time, Mrs. Everly spoke with the rasp of a longtime smoker, although she was not. “Whatever Marie cast out of Hal’s child went to Dominique instead,” she said.

  Liza didn’t have to acknowledge it; they all knew that was what her grandfather had meant, even if he hadn’t worded it that way. The three women sat in a long, steeped silence. Eventually, the chainsaws quieted outside as the men neared the end of their task. This was an ordinary afternoon in the twenty-first century, the age of technology, yet the three of them were in the kitchen making breakfast while they talked about an honest-to-God demon, anExorcist kind of demon. Worse yet, none of them had laughed.

  Angela’s brain had locked away her thoughts, and she fought to find them. “Why didn’t you mention that before, about the Fourth of July?”

  Liza clasped Angela’s hand with a damp palm. “I swear, I didn’t make the connection until now, talking to you. Sweets, come on—it’s one of Grandpa’s old stories. It doesn’t mean—”

  “It’s not just a story,” Mrs. Everly said. She looked nervous when they turned their attention to her, but she went on: “Marie never told me all the details, but she often called Dominique’s condition ‘her punishment.’ I asked her about Dominique once, about her illness, and she said Dominique was born a normal child, was a sunny child for years, and that she’d only fallen ill later. Marie said Dominique had been taken away from her to punish her. She never told me what she meant, or why she thought she was being punished. But she spoke of it with such certainty, such sadness. I always felt sorry for Marie, with Dominique that way. When we played cards, I think I saw her pain the way few other people did, even though she didn’t speak of it. Not even to you, Angie. She was insistent about keeping anything remotely painful far away from you.”

  Angela’s head hurt. She’d had only two migraines in her life, with dizziness and nausea on top of the viselike pressure against her temples. A migraine was coming. Worse than a migraine. “Mrs. Everly, why did you react that way when I mentioned the bathtub upstairs? I saw your face. Did Gramma Marie tell you about this?”

  Mrs. Everly lowered her eyes, embarrassed. She busied her hands arranging the plates of very cold fried-egg-and-bagel sandwiches. “There’s nothing she said. Marie was a very private person. We played Hearts and I helped her clean the house, and that was the extent of it,” she said. “But I’ve never liked that bathroom, the one upstairs.”

  “Why not?”

  “It makes my ears play tricks on me. I’ve often thought I…heard things. Footsteps, usually. A door slamming. Once I was on the stairs and I thought I heard someone cry out from that bathroom. Not a little boy, though—it sounded more like a girl. When I went to look, there was no one there. Another time, I was walking past the bathroom and I thought I heard splashing in the tub. Water, I thought. But when I went to see…I found mud.”

  “In the tub?”

  “Yes, in the tub, on the floor, in the toilet bowl, on the sink. There was quite a bit of mud. This was perhaps six months after Corey died, and I didn’t want to trouble you with it. I called a plumber then, but he found nothing in the pipes to explain it. I haven’t seen any mud since that day.”

  “Well, there’s some there now,” Angela said. “And my friend’s dog vanished from a locked house into thin air. And that’s not all of it. There’s probably more.”

  Once again, that brought a deep silence to the kitchen. They all listened, expecting to hear a strange noise from upstairs that instant, but they didn’t. The three women’s minds brewed separate horrors around the question consuming them:What was going on in this house?

  Their thoughts might have remained unbroken for a long time if Art and the other men hadn’t come swaggering inside to demand their breakfast, soaked with sweat and rain, enjoying the shared memory of their feat over nature.

  Angela had only seen newspaper newsrooms in movies,All the President’s Men andAbsence of Malice —where newsrooms felt important, the headquarters for vital work—so the Longview offices of theLower Columbia News were a disappointment. The newspaper wasn’t as small as she’d feared, but it was too tidy, and despite the large headlines from old editions posted on the walls, the room bore no sense of urgency. No one was hurrying to deliver a photograph or disk here or there, the telephones were nearly silent, and the few staff members in the room were languidly completing the tasks of their day. No deadlines. No pressure. No work that was changing the world.

  It was nothing like a place someone as smart as Myles deserved to be.

  But Myles’s office was a different story. The waiting area was decorated with mauve patterns on the wall and a matching sofa beside the secretary’s desk, and Angela could tell even with the door closed that the office must be large. One person was waiting to see Myles, a middle-aged man in a tie and dress shirt who looked anxious. At least Myles has power, she thought. The sign on the office door was brass and stylish:MYLES R. FISHER, MANAGING EDITOR . Not bad.

  The fiftyish secretary, who wore too much eye shadow, arched her eyebrows and asked Angela how she could help her. Angela said she wanted to seeMr.
Fisher, and no, she didn’t have an appointment, but please buzz in and tellMr. Fisher she was here. If he was busy, she would happy to be wait on the sofa untilMr. Fisher was ready to see her.

  Myles came out right away, and a half-dozen men and women carrying notebooks trailed behind him. It seemed likely that Myles had cut their meeting short when he heard she was here. Angela admired Myles’s deep violet dress shirt and silver-gray tie beneath his tailored gray suit. He might be dressing like a woodsman in Sacajawea, but when he came to work in Longview, he still looked like Washington, D.C.

  “Where did you learn how todress?” Angela said as he hugged her. She wished she’d kept her mouth shut when she noticed the secretary’s curious eyes, but it was too late now. Myles gave her a mock frown, then patted her shoulder to guide her into his office. Myles told the waiting man he would need a few more minutes. The last thing Angela saw before Myles closed the door behind them was the waiting man’s solicitous grin.

  “Well, look who’s the H.N.I.C.,” Angela teased. “Mr. Head Negro In Charge.”

  “It’s not as much fun as it looks. I might have to give out layoff notices early next year,” Myles said, offering her a seat in one of two leather chairs before his desk. There was a conference table for six by the window, flanked by mahogany bookshelves. Somehow, even potted palms were getting enough light in here, growing like a jungle. The office was beautiful.

  “I can see why the paper is having money problems,” Angela said. “Was this office like this when you got here, or did you give them a list of demands?”

  “I made a few suggestions about the work environment I prefer, and in return they have a better newspaper that sells more copies,” Myles said, his eyes laughing. There was a touch of shark in him, just as there was in her; they’d always recognized that in each other. Myles sat at the edge of his desk, where the pressed gray leg of his pants was four inches from her knee. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d noticed anyone’s proximity like that, but she enjoyed noticing it.

  “I’m thrilled you’re here, Angie. I wish I’d known you were coming, but”—he shrugged—“can you stay in town another hour, until five? I’ll take off early, and we’ll have coffee. There’s a Starbucks here now.”

  “Yeah, I’ll just go to my room,” Angela said. “You can pick me up when you’re ready.”

  Myles’s expression changed, dimming. “What do you mean? What room?”

  Angela hated to let go of the playfulness she’d been holding on to since she walked into the newspaper building, but she must have wanted to talk about it, because there it was. “I’m not staying at the house tonight,” she said. Her voice didn’t crack, no small accomplishment.

  Myles leaned closer, concerned. “Is it because your tree fell?”

  “Jesus,” Angela said, laughing despite the sting in her throat. “Are you running a story about it in tomorrow’s paper? How did you hear about my tree?”

  “Small town, doll-baby. Art came to see me about a news story earlier today. He told me.”

  “No, it’s not the tree. It’s a lot of other things. You don’t have time to talk now, so can you come to the Red Lion later? I’m in Room 205. Or I can meet you at Starbucks….”

  “No, no,” Myles said, standing. “Of course I’ll come pick you up. Room 205. I’m just sorry you’re having such a hard time up here, Angie. I wish I didn’t have this last meeting. But I should be finished in an hour, and I’ll zip right over. We can have an early dinner. There’s a decent Red Lobster close to your hotel. Good biscuits.”

  “It’s hard to say no to good biscuits.”

  “Then we’re on,” Myles said, smiling.

  They had shared only a handful of words, and Angela felt brighter already, at least in some small space of her psyche. She was trusting her instincts—she felt determined to, since intuition had served her so well over the last couple of days—and her instincts had brought her to Myles. She hoped she wasn’t only using her worries to flirt with him, but she couldn’t help that. She needed him.

  As Myles had promised, the Red Lobster near Three Rivers Mall in Longview had excellent biscuits. Angela was grateful to be in a large, busy restaurant. In L.A., she’d always complained that she ate out too much, but after a few days of fixing meals at home, Angela was glad to eat out. Already, she felt more steady, back on familiar turf. The menu was endless. She ordered a frozen margarita just because it was so easy.

  Myles heard her story from beginning to end, everything that had happened since their telephone conversation. The long series of events surprised even her, given that fewer than twenty-four hours had passed. But it was all there, in its amorphous awfulness.

  “And now you think I’m a raving lunatic,” she finished.

  Myles had been gazing at the ceiling while she spoke, concentrating. He looked at her and squeezed her hand across the table. “No, I don’t. I promise you.”

  “Then you believe my mother might have been possessed in 1929?” Her story told, Angela’s mood lightened again. She found herself smiling. “It would damn sure explain a lot.”

  “It would explain a lot inmost families,” Myles said. “You’re looking for the easy answer, Angie. There’s a lot your demon theory doesn’t explain. If your mother was possessed in 1929, what does that explain about Corey? That was more than seventy years later.”

  There, Angela was stumped. She’d been trying to think up the answer to that since Liza’s story. “I don’t know,” she sighed. “It’s an inherited curse? It jumps a generation? Or maybe it’s something in the house itself, something he got too close to. The tub, for all I know.”

  “And Naomi Price’s dog?”

  Angela sighed. “Maybe coyotes. Or, maybe the dog has something to do with it, too. I don’t know, Myles. But I can’t spend another night there. I’m in the film business, remember—and if this were a movie, this is the part where the audience would be screaming for the woman to get out of the house. So that’s exactly what I’m doing.”

  “That feels like good, sound judgment to me.”

  Angela stared, skeptical. “Really?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You think I have a good reason to be afraid of the house?”

  “I think you need to sleep somewhere you won’t be afraid.”

  She wanted more, but she could live with that. He wouldn’t humor her; Myles had always had an honest soul. He told you what he thought, no bullshit. She’d learned long ago never to ask him any questions she didn’t want the answers to. Angela sipped the last of her margarita, checking for the waitress so she could start on another. Her head already felt lighter, more detached. “Myles, I know you would sit here and talk to me all night if you thought you needed to. But you have to go, don’t you? I get the feeling you have someone to answer to.”

  “Ma has a nurse.”

  “I’m not talking about Ma Fisher.”

  Impatience flitted across Myles’s face, but quickly melted away. He stared at the tablecloth and sighed, resting his back against the booth’s cushion. “You have too many other things going on to worry about that, Angie.”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t like not knowing. Every time I’m around you, I feel someone watching over your shoulder, and I’m trying to understand why,” she said.

  Myles waited to answer, but not long. “Her name is Luisah. She lives here in Longview. She’s a yoga instructor. We’ve been seeing each other for six months.” He delivered his news with little inflection, hands clasped on the tabletop.

  The pain came, a small ripple over her. She waited for it to subside, but the wait took longer than she’d expected.Damn . Myles had a girlfriend. “My instincts are amazing me lately,” she said, but for a moment, neither of them could think of what to say next. Angela heard clinking silverware, a drone of conversation, and Latin-themed Muzak. She missed her margarita, badly.

  “You were right. This wasn’t a good time,” she said.

  Myles laughed, but it wasn’t a
happy sound. “I didn’t think it would be.” He wasn’t about to tell any more than he needed to, damn him. He was too merciful.

  “Do you love her?”

  At that, surprise sparked in Myles’s eyes. “Why are you asking that?”

  “It’s something else I want to know. If you love her.”

  Instead of answering, Myles searched for their missing waitress, and he found her with a wave. He asked her to bring the check before Angela had time to order her second drink. “Okay, I withdraw the question,” Angela said after the waitress hurried off.