The Riverhouse

by G. Norman Lippert

  He smiled up at her wearily. “What do you say, you want to ride into town with me?”

  They packed the Florida title painting in the back of Christiana’s Saturn, putting the rear seats down and laying it flat on top. Shane closed the trunk and jingled the keys.

  She looked up at him crookedly, squinting in the sun. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

  He merely shook his head. She nodded and turned away, heading up the passenger’s side of the car.

  When they were both inside, Shane started the car and began to turn it around. Christiana put her window down and looked out, up at the trees. “I thought you said Morrie was sending over his cousin or something?”

  “I called him and told him to cancel that.”

  “You talked to him? On a Sunday?”

  “Well, this morning, yes, but not when I called back. I left a message on his machine at the office. I have a feeling he checks that pretty regularly.”

  Christiana gave a little laugh. “He does. Calls in every few hours, even on weekends. His system’s old as the hills, but he says he prefers it. I’m surprised it still works.”

  Shane piloted Christiana’s Saturn down the gravelly drive, into the shadow of the trees. Reflections flickered on the hood like lace.

  As the Valley Road came into sight, peeking over the top of the next rise, Shane saw a semi truck there, unmoving. Its trailer caught the light blindingly, blocking the view beyond. Haulin’ ass is an important life skill, Shane thought idly.

  “Wait a minute,” Christiana said in a different voice. “You left a message on his office machine? Not his cell phone?”

  Shane shook his head. “No, not his cell. I thought that was for emergencies only. I called the office number. You think he didn’t get the message?”

  Christiana didn’t reply. Shane glanced at her. Her face was tense, thoughtful. She blinked and looked at him, then smiled and waved a hand in front of her face. “It’s nothing. Paranoia. Never mind.”

  Shane narrowed his eyes a little. “What is it? Paranoia may be a good thing right about now.”

  “It’s irrational,” she said, the smile dropping from her lips. “Like I said earlier. It was like when I worried that Randy might show up at the motel. There was no way he could know where I was, and yet I just couldn’t shake the fear—the certainty—that the next set of footsteps I heard would be him. I’d worried that he might have made copies of my keys. If so, he’d have a key to the cabin, but he’d also have a key to the office. I was thinking… maybe he thought that’s where I’d gone. Maybe he’d gone there himself, looking for me. Maybe…”

  “Maybe he’d listened to Greenfeld’s messages,” Shane said, completing her thought. He found it an extremely likely possibility. And if he’d done that, he surely wouldn’t have been above riffling through Greenfeld’s rolodex in search of Shane’s address. “So there’s a chance he knows where you are. Do you think he would come here?”

  Christiana shook her head, not in denial, but to say she didn’t know. Shane believed she did. The Saturn reached the end of the gravel drive and Shane nosed it to the right, turning the car away from Bastion Falls. The semi truck had finally moved on, chugging and sending up a cloud of blue smoke from its side exhausts. Shane angled in behind it.

  “Maybe it isn’t safe for you to stay here after all,” Shane said, reluctantly. “If he knows…”

  Christiana shook her head again. “Look, he can’t rule my life forever. I have to stop running.”

  Shane pushed the accelerator down slowly. There was a long line of traffic ahead, curving over into the left lane. A patrolman in a beige shirt with black pockets was directing traffic. His cheeks were red. Watching him, Shane felt a cold finger draw a line up his spine. He pulled ahead, following the truck as it angled over, passing by something in the right lane. Lights flashed beyond it, flickering red and blue. Something glittered on the gray asphalt, sparkling meanly in the sunlight.

  “Besides,” Christiana said, shaking her head. “If he knew… if Randy knew, he wouldn’t waste any time. If he heard your message he’d have left immediately. He’d have been here before we even…”

  Her voice trailed away as the truck sped up, passing the blockage in the road. Two patrol cars were pulled off onto the weedy shoulder, their light-bars flashing, illuminating the wreck where it lay in the ditch. Its wheels were up and its passenger’s door was wrenched open, pointing at the sky like the wing of a dead bird.

  Christiana sucked in a long, whistling gasp and raised both of her hands to her mouth, not quite covering it. The car in the ditch was a white Corolla. Shane could see the nameplate on the rear end, although it was upside-down. His gaze travelled from the wreck to Christiana and back again. They passed it slowly, and she watched it go by, her head turning, unable to look away. Glass lay in the road like confetti. Bits of a shattered tail-light sparkled red, looking like candy left over from a parade… or like stumps of colored chalk left lying on a cellar floor.

  Shane shuddered. He hadn’t meant to do anything other than to sketch Christiana out of the chalk drawing. The best way he’d known how was to change the person behind the wheel of the silver car, to change it from Christiana to… someone else. Anyone else. He hadn’t meant for it to be a specific person, but apparently that wasn’t the way such things worked.

  He’d used his fingers to smudge out the unmistakable image of Christiana, and in its place he had drawn a man. The figure had been thin and sharp featured, with dark hair neatly parted on the right. He wore wire-framed glasses. A mild scowl of concentration had creased his forehead, pulled down the corners of his mouth. It had been Randy, of course. Shane just hadn’t known it, anymore than he’d known when he was painting the footpath into the Riverhouse painting.

  Somehow, without intending to (at least consciously), Shane had spared Christiana the fate predicted by the chalk drawing only by passing it on to her tormenting boyfriend.

  And he didn’t feel the slightest bit bad about it.

  Shane pulled ahead, accelerating slowly, following in the wake of the semi truck. An ambulance was parked beyond the patrol cars, its rear doors closed. An EMT paramedic was standing in the weeds nearby, watching and smoking a cigarette. Nobody seemed to be in any hurry. Shane noticed that there was only one vehicle involved in the accident. There was, however, a set of long, looping skid-marks on the road, glistening black in the bright sunlight. They looked fresh. Shane was quite certain that they’d been left by a pickup truck; one coming from the opposite direction, from Bastion Falls.

  One with GMC stamped onto its huge, chrome grill.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Maybe it was another one of those things people understood instinctively, or maybe Shane had just picked it up somewhere along the way, perhaps from a magazine article or one of those awful afternoon talk shows: relationships that begin as a result of some outside adversity rarely last once the crisis is past.

  At first, Shane told himself that it was silly to even think about it. He and Christiana didn’t have a relationship, per se. At least not in the romantic sense. He’d just been the safe one. The good guy. That’s how it had always been in high school. I can’t go out with you, Shane, the girls would always say, you’re too nice. You’re like my brother. And they always smiled as they said it, crookedly, as if to say silly rabbit, Trix are for kids; pretty girls are for bad boys. Nice guys just draw pictures and watch Star Trek, but that’s enough, isn’t it?

  Shane knew that that was less true of grown-up romance than it was of the inbred world of high school dating, but it was a hard perception to shake. Sure, Christiana had come to him, had even called him first when she’d needed someone safe and solid in the midst of the awfulness with Randy. But that couldn’t be because she felt anything meaningful for him. Shane was a nice guy. He was safe. What kind of woman chooses to be with the safe guy?

  Of course, Steph had chosen him, but that had been different. Shane had pursued her, pursued her like he’d n
ever pursued any other woman in his life. She had let him, but she had never fallen for him, at least not like he had for her. Her love for him had been a choice that she’d made, based on logic and practicality. It had not been something that consumed her, drove her, fueled her passions. Later, she had come to feel some passion for him—Shane was sure of it, in his deepest heart—but that had only come as a result of her initial clinical choice to be with him. She hadn’t chosen to be with him because she couldn’t be without him, but because he’d scored well enough on the checklist of good husband requirements. Shane had gotten lucky with Steph. She was beautiful, intelligent and rock solid, even if she had been a little clinical and pragmatic.

  But Christiana was different. She’d never choose a man based on how he scored on any mental checklist. If that had been the case, frankly, she’d have never been with Randy. Somehow, Shane sensed that Christiana was a woman driven slightly more by her passions than she was by logic, despite her formidable intellect, and despite how she might appear to the casual observer.

  Christiana was a closet romantic. She’d probably hate being called that, and yet Shane felt certain that it was true, nonetheless. After all, she’d given up a solid future law career, funded by her lawyer parents, to pursue a nebulous livelihood in the world of art representation. She had done so merely because she liked art and wanted to share it with the world, despite the fact that she herself couldn’t create it. If that wasn’t the choice of a heart-and-soul romantic, Shane didn’t know what was.

  Women like that didn’t fall for the safe guys. They fell for troublesome men with shady histories and dangerous demeanors. A woman like Christiana might fall in love with a starving artist, but never the trustworthy go-to commercial artist, the one who wore button-down shirts and khakis to his shift, who listened to the foreman in his head more than he did the muse. Things like that just didn’t happen.

  No matter how much he might want them to.

  Randy had been killed in the accident. Shane knew that right from the beginning, from the moment he’d seen the paramedic standing next to the closed ambulance, smoking a cigarette.

  That afternoon, Christiana had gotten a call from Randy’s mother. Shane had been with her at the time, at Greenfeld’s office, having just unloaded the Florida painting. Christiana answered, and Shane could hear the woman’s voice on the other end, shrill and nearly incoherent. Her baby was dead, poor Randy, poor sweet little man.

  Christiana listened and nodded and offered admirable condolences, and Shane thought he knew everything he needed to know about the woman on the phone. Randy had been the sort of boy who'd killed grasshoppers with a magnifying glass, burning their eyes out while they twitched on the sidewalk, and this woman had been the one who’d decided, from the very beginning, simply not to notice. Her perception of him had probably stopped developing around the time he'd turned five years old. To her, he was still a baby, still a sticky-faced toddler with skinned knees and tousled hair. After all, that was a far more pleasant image than that of the sullen, grown-up man with the cruel streak, the one who was just as likely to glower at her with murder in his eyes as he was to kiss her on the cheek.

  Shane had been sitting at Greenfeld’s desk while Christiana talked to the woman, and Shane had doodled on a yellow Post-it pad with a dull pencil. He’d doodled the woman’s face, narrow and haggard, her eyes stunned wide, a phone clutched to her ear, her mouth hanging open, no teeth showing. As he sketched, the story grew in his mind, sending out tendrils of root, forming a disturbing scene.

  The woman knew her son had been dangerous, but had hidden that knowledge away, buried it, refused to look at it. Part of her had always been afraid—terrified, even—that her baby would someday take away someone else’s baby. She’d expected him to show up at her house someday with a shapeless figure in his arms, wrapped in Glad garbage bags, or with blood all over his hands, telling her not to call the police, that he’d had a little accident, but that he could take care of it himself.

  And she knew that she would do whatever he told her to do. Because secrets have their own kind of inertia. At a certain point, you just can’t stop them anymore. The weight of them will crush you. She would hide him, and protect him, and not ask any questions, no matter what.

  Even now, she had not called Christiana just to commiserate, to share her woe with the only other woman who had been close to her son. She had called Christiana to ensure that she, Christiana, was still alive, that her son had not murdered her before barreling off to kill himself, to plow his car into a tree on some nameless back road, grinning to himself and saying, you aren’t out of my reach yet, babe. Being dead won’t save you. I’m coming. Just you wait…

  Shane stopped doodling. The scene in his head was fed by the picture on the paper, and that had been fed by the voice of the woman blathering incoherently on the phone (was it just grief that Shane heard in the woman’s voice? Or was there a little secret relief, as well?) but it wasn’t a nice picture, and he didn’t want to think about it anymore.

  He dropped the pencil onto Greenfeld’s desk, stripped the Post-it off the rest of the pad, and tore it in two. He balled the pieces up in his fist. Christiana looked at him, at his fist, then at his face, meeting his eyes. She shook her head sadly, listening to the woman on the phone.

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “I’m sure you’re right. He’s in a better place now.”

  But Shane could tell she didn’t believe it. And neither did the woman on the phone.

  Shane had invited Christiana to stay over at the cottage that night, but once they discovered that Randy was dead, there didn’t seem to be any point anymore. To his surprise, however, she didn’t seem to have any intentions of changing the plan.

  Without a word, she drove them from Greenfeld’s office to her downtown St. Louis apartment, a little duplex in a long narrow street, crowded with small, old houses and sweetgum trees. Shane followed her inside and mooned around the kitchen while she gathered a few things.

  Outside the little kitchen window he could see the corner of the rabbit hutch. He wondered if the rabbit inside was all right. He thought it would probably need watered and fed, but when he stepped out onto the back porch he found the hutch empty, its door neatly shut and clasped. The name painted over the door was “Winston”.

  Shane couldn’t know for sure, but he had a creeping certainty that “Winston” had been in the car with Randy when he’d crashed. He had probably been on the passenger’s seat, inside a cardboard box with holes punched in the lid. Randy may not have succeeded in capturing Christiana, but he’d managed to take two rabbits with him before he punched his ticket. For a guy like him, that probably wasn’t too bad a score. It was sad, but it could have been much worse.

  It would have been, if not for a few stumps of chalk and Shane’s skilled fingers. He shuddered when he thought about it.

  And yet, some part of him knew that the story wasn’t completely over. Christiana wasn’t safe yet. Not while Marlena was haunting the cottage, watching, filled with her inexplicable anger and misery.

  At first, the ghost had been pretty frightening, but she had also been sad, confused, even a little quaint. Now, all that was changing. She was no longer quaint. Now she was just frightening, especially because of her increasingly neurotic and frantic rage.

  Worst of all, Shane had a low, deep suspicion that Marlena was powerful, more so than she let on, maybe more so than even she knew. He thought of the last time he’d been out to the site of Riverhouse, thought of the way it had seemed to shimmer in the air over its dead foundation, faint, ghost-like in the twilight.

  Was Marlena responsible for that? Or was he? Had he conjured the house again simply by painting it? Neither answer was a comforting one.

  For the first time, he wondered if he should destroy the Riverhouse painting. It would pain him to do so, but he thought he could. If it would diminish Marlena’s power, if it would help keep Christiana safe, then he would do it.

  But not yet. Ther
e was still one more painting in his head, one more addition to the Shane Bellamy Insanity Stairs series. When that was finished, when the set was complete, then he would destroy the Riverhouse painting. Maybe he’d destroy them all. Not yet, though. His curiosity about the last painting was simply too great a force to deny.

  Besides, Marlena had never shown any sign that she could affect things in the physical world. Even when she attempted to speak, the most she seemed capable of was that awful, rattling sigh. She could be rather frightening, but surely she couldn’t pose any actual danger to himself or Christiana. Even the chalk drawing on the cellar floor—if, indeed, Marlena had been responsible for it—hadn’t he thought that it might just as likely have been a warning as a threat?

  He was rationalizing, of course. He was aware of it, but that didn’t change anything. It had occurred to him that it might be dangerous to allow Christiana to stay at the cottage, at least for any length of time. But surely not for one or two days. After all, Marlena listened to Shane. She had heeded him ever since that very first night, when she had first appeared and he had shown her the silver baby rattle. She watched him paint sometimes, and he sometimes watched her go on her nightly rounds, haunting through the library and kitchen, up the studio stairs, restlessly roaming, her black eyes solemn. She was his muse. She may not like Christiana, but he felt confident that he could keep Marlena mollified for a day or two.

  Nobody intends to get into an abusive relationship, Christiana had said. Some of us just don’t intend not to.

  Shane shuddered as he stood on the back porch of Christiana’s apartment, looking into the empty hutch. He touched it, leaned on it with his right hand. The new rabbit’s name had been painted over the previous one, but Shane could still read the original name, faint under a coat of white primer: Percy.