by Ronald Malfi
Something moved inside the house, some subtle transfer of energy I felt rather than glimpsed through the cracks in the building’s facade. Was it you, haunting the remains of your childhood home? There was a door here, the concrete steps leading to it a crumbling, loose pile of rubble. I climbed atop the pile and peered through the crack between the door and the frame. I could see nothing inside the house except the faintest shimmer of daylight spilling between the exposed rafters. I backed away and the door shook loosely in its frame. Pressing on it, I felt just how accommodating it was. There was no doorknob, but in the place where the knob had been was a hole cut into the wood. I slipped my fingers into the hole and felt the door give easily enough. I opened it, bent forward, and stepped across the threshold.
There was a noise, and a sharp, sudden pain.
The world went black.
3
I watched as a thing with blazing red eyes and steam seeping from its pores spoke in quiet, dulcet tones to a teenage girl with golden hair. They stood together on a stone bridge in the middle of the night, the moon a fat pearl floating in the sky and its reflection rippling on the surface of the river below. The girl spoke to the thing, laughed along with it. She could not see that the thing’s head was filled with gas and that its eyes were boiling in their sockets. She could not see that the inner workings of the thing had been corrupted and that a poison shuttled inside it, corroding the bits and pieces that had once made it human. She talked and she laughed and the thing talked and laughed along with her. Clouds of steam billowed from its mouth as it laughed, but the girl did not see it. Not at first. And when she did finally see it, it was too late. The thing was upon her, scorching hot and whistling like a teakettle, eyes that had become bright red headlamps and teeth like finger bones. For a moment, it changed and became a thing in a hooded sweatshirt holding a handgun, pointing it not at some teenage girl, but at you as you stood in a suburban boutique, before it changed back into the monster. The last thing the girl knew was the burning, acrid stench of gas fires, and the heat that radiated from the thing’s hands, which had fashioned themselves into claws, monstrous once more, and were now squeezing, squeezing, squeezing the life from her body…
4
I opened my eyes to a sky intersected by charred black beams. I was on my back, my mind muddled with confusion. As I struggled to sit up, a lightning bolt of pain fired through the center of my skull, causing me to wince. I touched a tender spot in my scalp, just above my hairline, and my fingers came away slippery with blood. As I sat there staring at my fingers, I felt more blood trickling down my face and stinging my left eye.
Beside me on the ground was a brick, a bit of blood and hair stuck to it. Not without pain, I craned my head around and saw that I was in the burned-out remnants of a house. A dim recollection returned to me—of pushing through a fire-scarred wooden door and the world going black. I looked at the doorway through which I had come, and saw that there was a collection of loose bricks above the frame. I had unwittingly jarred one loose as I had come through the door, and it had walloped me on the head, robbing me of my consciousness before I’d even hit the ground.
With some difficulty, I climbed to my feet then braced myself against the wall of your childhood home—what remained of it—and hastily swiped the blood from my face. The wound in my scalp felt like it was on fire. I remained leaning against the wall, catching my bearings, until a laugh shook itself loose from my throat.
My head throbbing, I baby-stepped my way back down the gravel driveway toward the road. As I stepped over the chain at the mouth of the drive, I saw a woman walking toward me from across the street. She looked to be about my age, maybe younger, and was dressed in a maroon flannel shirt and jeans so faded they looked white. Her chestnut-colored hair was pulled back in a ponytail.
“Hello,” she said, smiling. “Interested in the property?”
“What happened to the house back there?”
“There was a bad fire there years ago.”
“Was anyone killed?”
She slowed her gait as she crossed the street toward me. Her smile faltered. “No, sir. No one was killed. I’m Tara Whitney. I live across the street.” She gestured at an ugly mustard-colored rancher caged behind a knee-high wire fence. The yard was crowded with lawn ornaments and countless dream-catchers of various sizes and colors hung from the eaves.
“What happened to the woman who lived here?” I asked. “Lynn Thompson?”
“Well, I’m not…” she began, then immediately went silent. She was staring at me as if in shock.
“What?” I said.
“You’re bleeding.”
“Christ.” I touched the tender spot on my scalp again then wiped my fingers on my pants, which were filthy anyway.
“What happened?”
“It’s embarrassing.”
She took a step closer to me to examine my wound. Winced at the sight of it.
“Does it look bad?”
“Might need stitches,” she said.
“Wonderful.”
She looked me in the eye again before retreating a couple of steps back. “I’m sorry, who are you?”
“My name’s Aaron Decker. I married Lynn Thompson’s daughter.”
“Her daughter?”
“Allison,” I said. “Allison Thompson.”
Tara Whitney’s face brightened. “Allie-Cat! Oh my God!” She laughed, covering her mouth. “I haven’t seen her in years! Is she with you?”
It felt like there was a hornet struggling to free itself from my throat. I coughed into one fist and said, “Allison passed away last December.”
Still smiling and shaking her head, Tara Whitney said, “What’s that?”
“She died.”
The smile drained from her face and her arms came up, folding themselves over her chest. One hand went to her mouth, and I heard a tink as her modest gold wedding band struck her front tooth.
Thunder bowled across the dark sky. A drop of rain fell on my cheek.
“I’m so sorry,” she said from behind her hand. “My God. Allison Thompson.” She shook her head, her gaze hanging on me with great weight.
Then the downpour came, crashing to earth and soaking us in a matter of seconds. Tara cried out and I pulled my coat up over my head.
“Come,” she said, holding out a hand for me.
“What?”
“Come with me.”
I took her hand and she pulled me across the street toward her house.
5
“I used to be best friends with those girls,” Tara Whitney said as she applied ointment to the gash in my head. I was seated at the kitchen table, a towel, which she had given me to dry my hair, draped around my neck. I listened to the rain hammer the roof and sluice down the windows that looked out onto a weedy garden crowded with plaster cherubs and large plastic sunflowers. The ointment stung, causing me to draw air through my teeth each time the cotton swab came in contact with the wound. “I grew up in this house. This was my parents’ house. My dad’s in Florida now, my mom’s passed away. Eric and me, we’ve made it our own, this house. Eric’s my husband.”
“When was the last time you saw Allison?”
“Not since she left Woodvine. We were teenagers. I’m two years older than she is.” She peeled open an adhesive bandage and brushed back my damp hair. With her tongue crooked in one corner of her mouth, Tara held the bandage against the cut.
“Ouch,” I said, and kicked one leg out from the chair.
“Don’t be a sissy.” She placed her hands on both sides of my face and stared intently at my eyes. “Doesn’t look like you’ve got a concussion, though I’m no doctor.” She released my face, then took a few steps back to study her handiwork. “Anyway, that should be okay. Looks like you won’t need stitches after all. Maybe.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.” She went around the other side of the kitchen counter and took two mugs down from a cupboard. “Had she been sick?�
�� she asked, and when I didn’t reply, she said, “It’s okay. I don’t want to pry. I’m sorry.”
Lightning briefly illuminated the windows.
“Some guy started shooting people at a strip mall just before Christmas. Witnesses said Allison tried to stop him.”
Tara leaned against the refrigerator. She covered her mouth again. Her eyes were as large as searchlights, staring right at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s not a very nice story. I don’t think I can keep telling it.”
“I just don’t believe it.”
I smiled weakly at her from across the gloomy kitchen. There was a pain in my chest now, severe as a knife wound.
“I bet those witnesses were right. That was Allison. She would’ve tried to stop the shooter.”
“What caused the fire to the house across the street?” I asked. I was desperate to change the subject, but I was also curious. Upon seeing it, my mind began considering the worst about you, Allison. Sorry to say, but things had changed recently, and I wasn’t sure who the real you had been anymore.
“Well, I don’t really know. It happened several years ago. I remember watching it, the fire, over the treetops. It was the middle of the night and the whole sky was lit up. They had trucks come in from three different towns to put it out. The house was destroyed but they were worried about a forest fire getting out of control. It was the middle of summer; we were in a drought. The woods turn to kindling around here in the summer.”
“Was Allison still living there when it burned?”
“No, she’d left Woodvine a few years before. She left when she was eighteen.”
“Was Lynn Thompson home when it happened?”
“She was, yeah. I remember her sitting in the open back of an ambulance with a blanket around her shoulders. She was lucky to get out alive.”
“Is she still alive?” I asked.
“Lynn lives in Beaumont now, the next town over. I keep in touch with her because I’m the real estate agent on her property.”
“Allison told me her mother was dead.”
“Oh,” said Tara. The coffee machine burped, and she seemed grateful for the interruption. She filled two mugs. “Milk?”
“Black is fine.”
She came over and set both mugs down on the table. Outside, the storm continued to rage.
“It’ll pass soon enough,” Tara said, casting an eye out the window as she joined me at the table. “Storms come quick and furious out here, but they don’t last. They’re like little explosions.”
“You don’t seem too shocked that Allison had told me her mother was dead.”
She made a face that suggested it was none of her business, then hid behind her coffee mug.
“I guess they had a real bad relationship,” I said, watching the rain against the windowpanes. “Allison and her mother.”
“Lynn had never been an easy person to get along with. She’s mellowed out some over the years, but she was never really a mother to those girls. And, I mean, things happened.” She clutched her mug in two hands, brought it to her lips, but did not drink it. A curtain of steam rose in front of her face. “I guess you know about Allison’s sister Carol? What happened to her?”
“I know she was murdered. I know that, for a time, Lynn’s boyfriend, a guy named James de Campo, was considered a suspect by the police.”
“That guy was a terror,” Tara said. “I don’t know if he killed Carol or not—my husband thinks he did it—but he was a real piece of work. That’s how Allison and I became close, when that guy moved into their house. Before that, I’d been friends mostly with Carol—she was my age—but after Jimmy moved in across the street, Allison spent a lot of time out of the house. She stayed over here some nights. I thought of her kind of like my little sister back then.”
“What about Carol? Did she stay here a lot, too?”
Tara set her coffee back down on the table. “Carol had changed by then. When she died, we hadn’t been as close as we were when we were kids. That happens sometimes, but with her, it was kind of sad.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because she was a victim. I mean, I didn’t realize it at the time, but that’s what she was.”
“A victim of her mother’s boyfriend? Of abuse?”
“A victim of her mother,” Tara said. “But, I mean, a victim of circumstances in general, I guess. You don’t grow up in a house like that and become Snow White, you know what I mean?”
“Lynn was abusive?”
“Lynn was just an all-round train wreck. Drugs, alcohol, you name it. And every guy she ever brought home was ten times worse than she was. Those girls didn’t stand a chance.” She looked me up and down. “Except maybe Allison did. I mean, she did. She got away from here. And for the record, you don’t look anything like the type of guy I would’ve expected Allie-Cat to wind up with. What are you, a lawyer or something?”
I laughed, though my body felt depleted of all humor.
“Anyway, she was a tomboy,” Tara went on, half-smiling in recollection as she stared out the windows at the rain. “Her fingers were always dirty, her hair always uncombed. There was nothing very girly about Allison Thompson.”
“You wouldn’t have recognized her in a million years,” I said, taking my cell phone from my pocket. I opened up the photo album and handed her the phone. “Go on. Scroll through them.”
“Good Lord,” she said, holding the phone just a few inches from her face. “Is that really her? You’re right—I never would have recognized her. She looks like a goddamn runway model. That black hair. Where are the bouncy yellow curls?”
“Beats me. Her hair was dark when we met.”
“No, she was a blonde, just like her sister. Beautiful long golden hair. After Carol died, though, she cut it. Short, like a boy’s, and choppy. I think she did it with a pair of scissors in the bathroom.”
“Is that right,” I said, my mind returning to what James de Campo had said about you showing up on his doorstep looking like someone who’d been eating out of trashcans. I’d already seen you this way in your yearbook photo, of course, yet I still couldn’t reconcile that tiny black-and-white image with the woman I had married.
“She marched to her own drummer, all right,” Tara said.
I drank my coffee while Tara scrolled through the photos on my phone. Outside, the rain began to taper off.
After a time, she handed me back the phone, then stood up from her chair. “Hold on a sec,” she said, then vanished down the hallway. When she returned a few minutes later, she was carrying an old shoebox. A few strands of hair had come loose from her ponytail and floated like gossamer in front of her face. There was a tattoo of a star behind her right ear.
Tara dragged her chair next to mine then set the shoebox on the table. She opened the lid and I saw that it was filled with photographs. They were scattered about in there, in no particular order or arrangement, just loose and existing and touching each other like memories do.
“Hold on, let me find it,” Tara said, rifling through the photos in the box. “I know it’s in here. I think it’s—here! Here it is.”
She handed me a photograph of a thin-framed girl of about ten or eleven, hair like plaited sunshine, a half-smile on the girl’s face that might have been a smirk. It was you, Allison. There was complexity behind your eyes even then. Your head was tilted as if to examine your own shadow that stretched out on the pavement at your feet but your stare clung to the camera.
Something hitched inside my chest. I tossed the photo back into the shoebox and then took a sip of coffee, forcing my gaze away from the picture and back out at the dwindling storm. Fat pearls of water dropped from the eaves and ran in squirmy rivulets down the windowpanes.
Tara was perceptive enough to register my despair. She set the lid back on the shoebox and pushed it away from us. She had the good sense not to apologize.
“I want to talk to Lynn,” I said. “I need to tell her about what happened to Allison
. Could you give me her address?”
Tara exhaled audibly. “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”
I looked at her. “What do you mean?”
Tara shook her head. “Like I said, she’s never been an easy person to get along with.”
“I think she needs to know that her daughter is dead.”
“For Lynn, Allison has been dead for years. Dead to her, anyway. I’m not sure it would mean anything for you to tell her what happened. I’m not sure she’d care.”
“That can’t be true,” I said. “She’s still her mother. I feel like she should know what happened.” There was something else, too, that I needed to know—something about the house, and the fire that had reduced it to rubble—but I didn’t say this aloud.
Tara checked her wristwatch. On the counter, the coffee machine made a hissing noise.
“Let me change my shirt,” she said, getting up from her chair. “I’ll drive you.”
6
It was a twenty-minute drive through verdant farmland that glistened in the aftermath of the storm. Beaumont was gleaming metal grain silos and billiard halls and gas stations that looked as extravagant as miniature amusement parks. I had balked at the idea of Tara driving me out here, but she had insisted. “If I’m wrong and you do have a concussion, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if you drove off into a ditch,” she’d said as she pulled on a bright pink rain slicker from her hall closet and grabbed her purse. I’d relented.
We did not talk about you, your mother, or your sister on the drive to Beaumont. Instead, Tara asked questions about me—where did I live, what did I do for a living, did we have any children? She made a valiant effort to be engaging—and I’ll admit that I liked her; she was very sweet—but I felt like there was a tornado gathering momentum inside my chest.
During the drive, I kept checking my cell phone to see if I’d missed a call from Denise Lenchantin, or maybe a response to my text messages. But no, I’d missed nothing. She hadn’t gotten back to me… and this fact caused a new breed of worry to rise up in me. I had told Peter Sloane that I had spoken with Denise, so he knew she was out there talking about the encounter to whoever would listen. Maybe she couldn’t identify the guy’s face, but she certainly could describe the car. And what had Sloane said to me when I’d told him the type of car the killer had been driving? An old sedan with a spotlight on the door? Hell, I still drive one. It’s not as uncommon as you’d think. It’s not like you have a license plate number.
