by Alan Spencer
“Take a drink if it’ll calm you down. And you’re shivering. You’re cold.”
He gathered his Iowa State sweatshirt and draped it over her. In the moment she pulled up to the house distraught, he’d forgotten what had happened the other night and their misunderstanding. It didn’t appear to matter to her now.
He waited for her to speak up after two long pulls from the bottle.
“This is hard to tell you because it involves you and the house.”
“Me and the house? What are you talking about?”
She placed her hand over his and offered an apologetic look. “It’s nothing against you, Andy. You’re a nice guy. I know we just met, and it was a mean thing to pull, but it was my father who pressured me to do it. He threatened to kick me out of the house if I didn’t. Andy, I don’t have a job, I’m not married, and I have no idea what I want to do with my life. Without my father, I can’t make it.”
“Don’t you have other family?”
“None that would take care of me,” she sobbed. “But that’s beside the point.”
He patted her back, giving her the benefit of the doubt. “You have a friend in me, okay? And who says your dad is in trouble? You want to go looking for him? I’ll search with you.”
“I’ve looked all day.” She turned her eyes up to Andy’s, and they were swimming in tears. “I went to the police, and they told me I have to wait. My dad has a habit of disappearing without telling me and then turning up much later. But this time I’m really concerned.”
“What were you about to tell me? You said he made you do something. What does it have to do with me and the house?”
Mary-Sue’s chin quivered. “I’m sorry I did this to you, Andy. Please forgive me.”
“What is it? It’s best you just throw it out there.”
“My father,” she whispered, “he made me do it. I like you, Andy. I hope you’re still my friend after I explain everything. My father knows a lot about your late uncle. He’d drink with James in his back yard sometimes and shoot the breeze. James would tell him stories about his magic shows. He even showed my father his stage props. That’s why he was disappointed when he heard James burned most of them. I guess James became a cult celebrity. And then one of my father’s nephews contacted him about the possibility of finding something of James’s to sell for big money.
“And that’s when your other uncle began staying at the place and taking care of the property and trying to sell it. My father tried many times to search the house for something to steal that belonged to James, but Ned locked the place up, and my father didn’t want to get caught for breaking and entering. He was a coward when it came to the idea of prison. His brother went to prison for assault charges for seven years, and when he was released he had scars to show him. Bad scars in unbelievable places. Uncle Mike had been stabbed in the back with a razor blade in the showers, almost strangled to death with an electrical cord, beaten with a pillow case full of broken up rocks, and raped. Uncle Mike used to be a cop, and they don’t treat cops well in prison. When you showed up the other day and Ned left, my father decided to check the house. He convinced me to invite you over and and…seduce you.”
“I knew something was wrong with the way you approached me. It didn’t seem natural. So your father was at my house when I came over?”
“Yes. The plan was to get you out long enough for him to comb over the property. My father wants to retire, and he promised me a piece of the action. I didn’t really believe him, but I depend on him for so much right now. I can’t wait to break away from him, I swear to you, Andy. All I need is some money and a descent job, and I’m gone.”
“Well,” he sighed, surprised that he wasn’t upset, “it doesn’t look like he took anything. I’m not mad, okay? You’re so scared. If that’s what bothered you so much, we can move on. It’s okay.”
“He hasn’t come back since then, and that’s why I’m here. I haven’t seen him or his truck. No phone calls, Andy, and no notes on the table, and no friend of his has called to tell me he’s passed out at their house.”
He helped her up from the couch. “I have to show you something.”
She followed him out the front door. “What is it?”
He guided her through the front yard and down the road to the set of trees where the pick-up truck was parked. “This is your father’s truck, isn’t it?”
She froze. “Yeah, but it doesn’t make sense. Where is he then? That ruins Deputy Stafford’s theory that he’s with Mrs. Johnston. I don’t even think they’re dating anymore. This means something happened to him. It has to.”
“How can you be sure? What if the car broke down, and he walked somewhere to get it fixed?”
“Then why hasn’t he turned up by now?” she snapped, kicking the passenger side door. “The tires aren’t flat, the hood’s not propped up, and my dad hasn’t turned up for over twenty-four hours.”
He was startled by her outburst. “Then what do you want to do?”
“Deputy Stafford said if he didn’t show up by tomorrow, he’d put the wheels in motion to form a search party.”
“I’ll look with you, okay?”
She smiled for a brief moment. “Sorry I yelled at you.”
“Should I take you home?”
“Will you stay with me tonight? I know it’s asking a lot after admitting I set you up for my dad to break into your uncle’s house, but it’d mean a lot to me.”
“Okay,” he replied, not having to think about it. Despite the short time knowing each other, he couldn’t let the closest thing he had to a friend go, especially over something so trivial compared to a missing person. “Let me grab my cell phone and keys, and I’ll be right out.”
He retrieved the items, working fast, thinking how it was strange to learn the truth about Mary-Sue and her father. He pictured the man sneaking through the rooms and cursing under his breath after finding nothing. What if Mary-Sue was right and something did happen to her father? The only possibility was the truck breaking down on the side of the road and the old man walking back home and suffering a broken ankle or a heart attack and was lying dead somewhere in the woods.
He locked the door—paranoid that someone else might search for a James Ryerson collectable—and brought his concern back to Mary-Sue. “Do you think he could be out there in the woods? He might’ve had car trouble and decided to walk back to your house.”
“Why would he hide the truck like that?” It was obvious she’d considered the idea herself and refuted it. “Sure, he could’ve broken down, but he wouldn’t have hidden it like he did unless it was from the other night when he was breaking into the house. Otherwise, he would’ve pulled over to the shoulder like any normal person would.”
Mary-Sue wrapped her arms around him, grateful for his kindness. “Thank you for being so nice to me. I don’t deserve it. I lied to you.”
“I’ll move on. And besides, there’s nothing in that house that’s really worth a damn…although I did find a cool film projector.”
The farm was blanketed by nightshade from the overhanging oak and maple limbs that surrounded the property. The land in this part of Anderson Mills wasn’t any good for growing crops, but it was perfect for dairy farming. The rich scent of hay and cow patties circulated in the soft breeze. The red and white painted farm house also contained horses, which Mary-Sue explained were kept for local shows. They paid her father yearly rent for taking care of them. Andy didn’t realize how many ways a farmer could make extra money on the side, including burglary.
Mary-Sue walked him to her house, a white and brown colonial. The woods were yards out from the east end of the house. The cattle pens were located across the way. Andy made out a few glinting eyes through the darkness.
“How many people work on this farm?”
“Four, but today’s an off-week. We take our own vacations, I suppose. The workers will be back next Monday. We still do the milking by hand. People pay high prices for naturally produced milk w
ithout hormones. These cows have it pretty fucking good. They eat hay in the shade, we spray them down with water, brush them to give ’em a massage, and they’re not corralled or hooked up to weird devices. Eddie Stolburg’s slaughterhouse is along the same lines. They humanely butcher their meat. It’s the new fad.”
“It’s a contradiction,” Andy scoffed. “How can you kill something humanely, not that I’m a vegetarian or an activist.”
“Stolburg injects the cow with a kind of natural stimulant that gets them high, and yes, I agree, it’s hard to say anyone can humanely kill anything, but it’s better than most of the industry. The other two slaughterhouses can go through a hundred cows in a day, at least, and they’re crowded and stamping through their shit, and their throats are slit and they just bleed to death everywhere. It’s deplorable. And most slaughterhouses hire illegal immigrants, and if they get injured on the job, they have no legal rights. The meat industry’s a real mess. It’s too bad nobody cares.”
She motioned for him to enter the house. “And we don’t raise chickens. My father used to, and when he tried to make me cut the head off of one, I fainted and hit my head.” She pointed at the faded white line above her left eyebrow. “Doctor had to give me twelve stitches. I landed on a sharp rock.”
Andy sat on the living room couch, and she relaxed on the rocking chair across from him. There was no television or stereo in the room. “How do you pass the time? There’s no electronics.”
“I have a television and a boom box in my room.” She rolled her eyes. “I’m not a dumb country girl. I do know how to have fun. I bet I could drink you under the table. You ever play pinochle drunk? You went to college. Don’t you party?”
“That depends on what you mean by party.” He was hesitant to go into details of his lame social life. “I dated a girl, and we watched a movie every Friday night and went to dinner, no big deal. The rest of the week was studying and working at the campus bookstore to help pay my tuition. I can’t say I did the fraternity thing. Only rich brats have that luxury.”
She moved from the chair to the couch next to him. “Anderson Mills has a bowling alley, or you can hit Barleycorn’s Pub, or Silver Lake is perfect for camping. You ever canoe the lake in the middle of the night? You should try it. It’s peaceful, something I could use now.”
“I wasn’t saying you don’t know how to have fun,” he backtracked. “My fun is watching movies. I’m a simple man. Maybe I’m not the one who knows how to have fun. I mostly like cheesy movies like Pretty in Pink and Mannequin. You watch those movies now, and it defines the 80’s, but you don’t see movies now that define anything. It’s all to sell something. Movies tie in commercial products more now than ever. It’s not about cinematic artistry. Hell, my college professor hired me to watch these horrible turkey horror movies that are over thirty or forty years old, and they don’t try and sell anything. You can tell what decade they were made just by watching ten minutes of them. It’s a slice of history. A time capsule.”
“So what are your projects?” she asked. “Do you have a movie you want to make? It’s cool you graduated from film school.”
“Right now, I have no ideas. Not really.” He shifted closer to Mary-Sue, enjoying her proximity. “I shot some short films in college. One was about a mom who hides her son when his name is picked for army enlistment during the Vietnam War. Poor guy gets drafted, right? The kid ends up going to war after a lengthy chase from state-to-state, hotel-to-hotel. The movie was pretentious though and bogged down by a lot of dialogue. I’ve done others, but nothing I’m too excited about. I’ve been thinking about shooting a documentary about my uncle and the mystery around his death.”
“You could do interviews around town. Yeah, that’s a good idea. People still talk about him, no offense. A lot of people don’t believe he died and others think something else happened to him.”
“Like a government conspiracy?” He laughed, but the thought had crossed his mind before. “The idea of my uncle murdering thirty or fifty or whatever number of people is ludicrous. He was a drunk frustrated with his career, but he wasn’t a killer. It’s impossible.”
“I agree, but a lot of people take what the police say as law—ironically.”
“That’s bullshit. Now I feel I’d be committing a big mistake on my uncle’s behalf if I didn’t try and straighten things out, or at least shed new light on the situation. I guess it wouldn’t cost a lot to rent a camera—and digital is cheaper than film these days—and to interview people wouldn’t cost money, but I’d probably face a lot of bullshit from the police.”
“I bet you’d be fine. I think people would be very interested in knowing the truth, or at least looking at it in a different way. You’d have to be sneaky about it.”
“A lot of independent filmmakers have to bend rules to complete the scenes without a permit or scout locations that they haven’t had permission to use. It’s mostly a matter of budget, but in this case, everything I need is in the people of Anderson Mills. I’ll find a way.”
“I’d talk about what I think happened with your uncle in your movie. And maybe if I was there with you, I could help you convince people to talk. I could be your assistant. I know everybody in town.”
She suddenly checked the time, worried. “Do you want to go looking for my father again for a little while? You could be right. He could be in the woods.”
“Anything to help, sure.”
He waited in the living room as Mary-Sue dug out two flashlights from a kitchen drawer and then returned. “Okay, let’s go.”
2
This is a mistake.
Ned had put it off all day. Pricilla’s Tarot Card Reader and Medium wooden sign displayed the hours of business. She was open until midnight during the weekdays. Underneath the paintings of a glowing crystal ball and numerous astrological signs, it mentioned Pricilla performed house calls.
I wouldn’t want that batty chick in my house.
He waited on the front step, the porch light’s glow extending out to his parked truck. The light itself seemed to beckon him.
What are you waiting for, huh?
A shrouded head peeked out from the window and drew back the curtain.
Now you have to go. The woman spotted you.
The front door opened. He grumbled under his breath, regretting his decision, and walked across the threshold, though he was alone once inside. Here goes twenty dollars. How many drinks could that have gotten me at the bar?
Whatever Pricilla would reveal, it’d be smoke blown way up his butt, but maybe it’d be fun. He’d glared at the house for years without a second thought, but after Andy came into town and relieved him of it, he still carried the burden of his brother’s death and he wanted to finally be rid of it.
“Shut the door behind you,” the lady requested from another room, through a decrepit throat. “Come in already.”
He did as he was told, still without a good look at the woman. He took in the aromas of mildewed carpet and jasmine candles. The furniture was draped in white blankets. In the far corner, she had a television and a collection of astrology books and the occult on a bookshelf.
Lucrative hoopla. The woman will probably tell me unicorns and dragons are real by the time the night is over.
He caught her profile and followed her. They passed a kitchen to the left. A bottle of wine was propped on the kitchen table alongside a block of expensive cheese and crackers. The hallway he was in led directly to a side room. Silver beads hung in the doorway. He stepped through them to find the strange woman hunched over a round table lighting a series of black and red candles.
Her words were a creak. “Have a seat, Mr. Ryerson.”
“How do you know who I am?” He was skeptical, but caught off-guard, nonetheless. “You’ve seen me before? I guess I’m a local.”
“I knew your brother, James, very well.” The woman’s voice had an accusation in each syllable. He couldn’t see her face yet under the gray cloak she wore. She gave off th
e appearance of a gypsy. “It’s unfortunate what befell him. He was playing with the spirits, and they’re not always what they appear to be.”
“Why are you telling me this, ma’am? I thought you read palms and futures.”
“I do that to make ends meet, as we all do in our own lines of work. But you’re in danger and so are many people. Some have already died because of your brother’s mistakes, but he’s not the only one to blame.”
The woman turned up to him, and he got a look at her. She was shrouded in dark blue velvet with a red sequined sash. Rings choked each of her fingers in the color of indigo blue, olive green, ivory white, and burgundy red. A broach that looked like an eye was pinned at her hip. Her face was deep in shadow, most of her features hidden except her long and crooked nose that looked like a gnarled ginseng root. Hard lines covered what probably once used to be smooth skin, her mouth set in a permanent sneer.
“If you want your future to be read through tarot cards or your palm read, then your best advice would be to leave right now, Mr. Ryerson.” The woman picked up a green bottle of unmarked wine from the table. The fluid ran into two bronze goblets decorated with red diamonds. “Drink this with me and have a seat.”
A sliver of anxiety slowed his response. It has to be a put-on. Somehow, Pricilla knew you were coming. I don’t know how, but something’s not right.
“You’re skeptical,” Pricilla laughed. “Everyone is, and they have a right to be.”
He reached into his pocket to produce a twenty dollar bill.
“Keep your money, Ned Ryerson. You’re here now, so why don’t you sit down and listen? I have a lot to tell you. People are in danger, including your nephew. Andy is in the middle of a potential disaster. If you’re to understand, then I’d suggest you keep an open mind.”
