by Kit Reed
The day it happened nobody missed Leah until supper when we sat down, all but that sweet girl. Dakin was frantic; he searched, her brothers searched. They found her sobbing her heart out in undercroft, too shattered and distracted to make sense, even after Dr. Woods came and gave her laudanum to calm her down. She wouldn’t tell us how or why she went down there or what happened to her or who did it, she just cried and cried. It was a man, we discovered soon enough, and Little Manette despised Leah for what it made of her. She was so bent on protecting her family’s reputation in Jacksonville that she put Leah to bed and kept her there until it was time for Dr. Woods— she was just sixteen!
Manette cared more for her position in society than she did for that poor child. Nobody was allowed into Leah’s room, not even her father, Manette told us when she locked that door and slipped the key into a velvet pouch she wore around her neck. She told the children that Leah had contracted a wasting disease. Who was I to tell them it was a lie?
“She’s contagious, darlings.” No visitors, just Little Manette, when she happened to think of it, and Tillie, our sweet little wet nurse who stayed on for years after she went dry, looking after the Ellis children until she got too old to work and Little Manette sent her away.
Poor Leah stayed in that bedroom until it was time to call Dr. Woods. He and the midwife came, and Little Manette took to her bed. I heard the child screaming, but they wouldn’t let me go to her! After two awful days, the doctor opened Leah up and pulled her baby out. Another girl, healthy and perfectly formed. He waited too long! There was too much blood, and we lost Leah that day.
When the Hewell brothers came to take her away, Dakin ordered them to report it as a death from dengue fever, Manette’s orders. It was right there in the death notice printed in the Jacksonville Times-Union along with Leah’s sixteenth-birthday photograph, so as far as the family was concerned, incurable fever put Leah Ellis in the grave.
And her baby? My vain, greedy daughter named that child Elena after some dead saint, and as she had before, at the one time none of them will talk about, she claimed Leah’s motherless baby as her own and all Jacksonville believed her because by that time there was something growing in her belly that even the cleverest dressmakers and finest silks could not exactly hide.
There was a party, so all Jacksonville could see Manette Robichaux Ellis cuddling her nice new baby in the christening dress my vain mother had bought for my daughter’s christening—the sheerest silk organza, with a thousand flounces trimmed in Belgian lace.
So much for Leah’s poor orphan child. Manette put Tillie in charge and went on about her business, trotting Poor Elena out to curtsy to every guest who came into the house. It’s a mercy that God took a hand and put my daughter in her grave before she could do anything worse.
By the time my daughter died and Poor Elena escaped this house, the girl was almost too old to find an acceptable man. Little Manette kept the girl home by taking to her bed: she was Poor Elena’s bounden duty and her anchor, forever demanding, never satisfied. Leah’s mean, conceited twin sisters had been married and divorced by the time their mother died. The tumor had stopped growing but it turned to stone.
The twins were back and they ruled the roost, as strict and demanding as Little Manette at her worst. I saw Cinderella played out on this very hearth. Poor Elena managed to meet that nice boy in spite of her jealous aunts. She and Edwin Parkson were in love. I helped the child elope, never mind how, for by that time I was just a shadow in this world. They honeymooned downtown at the Windsor Hotel, but only for a night. Poor Elena brought her sweet young husband home to May Street the very next day— “Just until we find a house,” she said. Of course it dragged on and on. Foolish girl. I tried to warn her, but I was long dead. In a way.
I was …
Never mind what I am.
What could I do to protect the sweet boy our Poor Elena married, what could I possibly do? He died in a terrible accident on the back stairs. It happened the week before Elena had their little girl. Edwin was dead by the time the doctor came, and he was only the newest in this strange, long line of sad lives and untimely deaths brought on by Ellis women who dared to bring new men into this terrible house. And they?
Every man jack of them died. And what shall I do about this new, angry, disorderly boy who is bound to defy me?
Take care of him!
CHAPTER 10
Dell
So far, he’s moved his stuff from the overpass to May Street in stages, but not into his shelter under 553. He’s stashed everything but the sleeping bag behind the last truck in the truckers’ shed at the back of the ruined parking lot next door, where the old ladies never go. The bedroll’s the only thing he keeps in his new quarters. He won’t move the rest until it’s time, but that’s not the whole reason. It’s an issue of incompleteness that he’s not ready to address.
These nights, he waits until the house goes dark to enter. Then he slips through the gap between the shed and cyclone fence behind the poplars the old ladies planted to hide the obscenity next door. When he’s satisfied that they’re done for the night, he enters. He unrolls his sleeping bag and lies here in the dark, pondering.
Crucial parts of him are missing. A whole chunk of his life, for one. That part is so huge and so fucked up that he’s fixed on a problem he thinks he can solve. He thinks it’s the flash drive. It was the only leftover from his ex-life that he recognized when the hospital returned his stuff the day he was discharged. High-tops that felt like they were his, the jeans were close enough, jacket was too big. Then the object slithered out and bit his hand.
Dell doesn’t know why he had the flash drive or what’s on it, and unless he scores a computer, he can’t find out. Forget the library computers, they’re all connected. Insert that thing long enough to open it and you’re yelling, Look, everybody, it’s me. Connect and any fool can track him down.
Any fool could sneak up from behind and hit him with a sock full of shit.
He needs to destroy this record of things he doesn’t want to know about. Drop the flash drive in the river or smash it with a rock, he thinks, although he has no idea why thinking about it makes his mouth dry up and his belly clench. Bury it. No. Stupid. Throw it under a bus.
Or open it.
Guilt rolls in and smashes him flat. OK then. Get it. Open it and find out, so you can get over it.
The problem is, it’s lost. He was so close to done moving that he got careless on his last run on the squat. Creeping out with his flashlight, he examines every carton and garbage bag in the truckers’ shed and comes up empty.
He’d have heard it drop on the road between here and the last rise. He would have heard a clink, scrape, something. It must have fallen out of a hole in one of his cartons or a rip in the garbage bags when he dragged them uphill from the squat. Crap! His fault, he was so crazy to get in out of the cold.
It’s worse not knowing where the flash is than it was carrying it. He’ll go back and find it tomorrow at first light.
Sleep. Get up. Get your shit together. Get coffee. Retrace your steps.
He’s up and out before dawn, fanning the road between here and there with his Maglite, just in case. Nothing. He gets more coffee and goes to the head of the path that leads downhill through sandy rubble studded with patches of sandspurs. Cradling his extra-large coffee, he waits for the sun to get high enough. Then he’ll scour the path downhill to the abandoned squat. The terrain has changed, but at this distance, he can’t figure out what happened down there. It just looks different. It …
“Yo, Dell!”
Tensed for confrontation, he turns so fast that coffee flies. After months of this life, any surprise is a threat. Oh. It’s just one of the guys he more or less hung with before winter moved in and they all left. Bland, nameless itinerant guys. Like Dell: Peaceable. Past history, don’t ask. This bulky, easygoing squatter has a name. “Oh, Duane. Hey.”
Duane wipes coffee off his front. “What the fuck?”
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“Sorry about that. What are you … Like, why…”
“Come to see the renovations. You?”
Easy, Dell, this Duane is a kind-of friend. “Dropped a…” Flash drive! He stops. Don’t say it. Don’t. Right, “Phone, came back to hunt for it.”
“Good luck with that. You seen what they’re uptuh?”
“Not really.”
“City cleaned the damn place out. Reamed it with a backhoe, so by this time, your phone’s toast. Landmarks people or whatever. Making it so we never come back. You know. Cement, probably. Cut some grooves to kill your butt, plant spikes so you can’t lay down.”
Dell isn’t exactly listening. What phone? He used to have a phone, he guesses. Normal people do. His portable brain or his office or both. It probably got trashed when the cab hit him, unless they’re after him and he axed it to shut down the GPS.
So, did he actually lose a smartphone too, another one of those things that even normal people do? He no longer knows what happened and what didn’t. He hates being like this.
Duane sighs. “Means we won’t be back next year. Sucks.”
What else have I lost? Dell says what you say. “Sucks.”
Then out of nowhere, Duane blindsides him. “I wouldn’t be coming back to dig for it if I was you.”
“Say what?”
“Guys come around a couple weeks ago, sat down with us and a fifth of Jack, all nicey-nicey, but with money changing hands if we told them anything they didn’t know.”
Dell’s life comes to a full stop. “Guys?”
“Suits, white shirts, the whole nine, with a fifth and paper cups instead of passing around the bottle like normal people do. Stupid as hell in this neighborhood, them suits, but the whiskey was good.”
“DEA?”
“Not the way they was with us.”
“Fuck did they want?” Reflexively, he fingers the objects in his jeans pocket; loose bill, no change, so they’ll never hear you coming. Gravity knife, one flick and he’s armed.
“Not like they said.”
“And you said…” His hand closes on the knife.
Duane’s cracked lips split in a grin. “I don’t know nothing. I make a point of it. But they was looking for you.”
“Me?”
“Think so.” Nice guy, Duane, standing easy in his shoes. Lingering, kind of. Does not have to say, or something you’ve got.
Shit! If your sort-of friend here sees you scuffing around in the neatly turned dirt down there, if he follows, then the suits got to him. Go, “Phone’s probably toast, might get a rebate, so. Uh.” Casual, like it makes no never-mind.
“Need help?”
Worse: Duane cuts to the chase and tells the suits who I am and where I am. One false move and you’ll have to— Don’t go there. Dell takes his hand off the knife but his jaws clamp tight and his gut clenches. You don’t know what that place is. “Not really.”
“OK then.”
CHAPTER 11
Theo
We’ve been on May Street for three weeks now. Like she was waiting for my mom to bring her onstage for her hours of standup, Mormama got all up close and personal every time she came, yacking up old, old stories, like her and me were tight.
She won’t stop coming, drops in whenever she feels like it. Three A.M. Her favorite time. Sometimes she’s in a good mood and other times she’s awful. Like now.
You know boys are not welcome in this house.
Fuck I hate when that happens. Fuck I wonder what she’d do if she was alive right now and I said fuck. They didn’t have these words back when she was a real person. Probably she’d just blink like that creepy china baby doll Mormama brought for this Leah’s baby, but the twins took it away. They keep it in a glass box on the bottom shelf of the pier table, this great big marble-topped thing in the front room, and dead center on top is great-great-great Grandy’s watch under glass along with a brooch with one of fucking Teddy’s curls that I guess Mormama cut off before it happened, and here she is, all up in my face.
You have brought trouble into this place, and you know it. Scat, while you still can!
I try, “Go away. I’m not scared of you.”
I’m trying to help you.
“Don’t yell!”
Bad things happen to boys in this house. It isn’t safe.
“You don’t scare me.”
You don’t belong.
“Well, neither do you!” Dead forever ago, but here she is. Not again. I mean, still. She’d be about 160 years old by now. Nothing you can catch with your phone and so you can show your I-guess-it’s-a-Mormie to the cops or your exorcist priest and go, See! Not like I didn’t try. Nothing to see here; she is just that cold, cold presence in the room. In the portrait tucked into the downstairs bathroom she looks teeny, but what’s left of her is huge.
Be quiet, child.
When Mormama is pissed at you it’s like barbwire twisting in your gut.
I saw you down there. You brought trouble down on us, and trouble moved into undercroft.
“The what?”
I saw the two of you, you and that guttersnipe fouling my baby’s tomb.
“I did not!” That first time creeped me out. A couple of times I sneaked back down to her stupid undercroft and went inside just to check, but Dell was gone and I couldn’t be down there all by myself. I told her, but she wouldn’t quit!
The two of you, trampling poor Teddy’s bones.
“No way! He’s out there in Dakin Ellis Park with all the rest of them, I saw it! Aunt Iris left me and Aunt Rosemary off at the graveyard the day Mom and her went down to the bank. She made me climb up on the stone thing.”
Sarcophagus, dear.
“She made me pat the angel’s head!”
We were supposed to go to a movie that day when they went downtown to parlay with the banker, but Aunt Iris made Mom drop us at the graveyard instead, me and Aunt Rose, she said it was important for me to get in touch with my roots. We walked to the family plot with its very own spiked fence and at the end Aunt Rose broke the rusty lock and made me promise not to tell. Then I had to go up the marble steps to the marble coffin thing and hold on to the baby marble angel kneeling on top while she gave this stupid lecture.
I had to read the words out loud to her before she let me get down: TAKEN FROM US TOO SOON, and when I was done my old aunt went, “That’s your baby great-uncle, don’t ever play with matches, you hear?” And she put a crumpled flower on his grave.
Tonight I go, “No shit, Mormama. I saw him.”
But something put Mormama in an ugly mood. You only think you did.
“Really! He’s out there, under all that stone.”
She let me have it right in the gut. Just the parts they could find.
She went from tiny to tremendous. She loomed. Understand, I am here to protect him. Poor little soul. We’re trapped here until there’s nothing left of him.
I put up both hands, like I could push her out of my life. I heard me gargling, “Don’t!”
Now, go down there and tell that intruder he has to go.
“What makes you think there’s a…” Shit!
He’s trouble. Terrible trouble, he has to go!
“He’s gone.” Um. I think.
I saw you colluding down there, you and that stranger, defiling poor Teddy’s grave.
Shit, she knows! “No way.”
I saw the both of you.
“I have to go!” Like there’s anyplace safer than bed right now.
All right, go, if you think you’re brave enough, but understand this, Theodore Dakin Ellis-whatever-your-last-name-is, you go anywhere you want in this house as long as it tolerates you, but you do not go back to undercroft. You can NOT be there, understand?
“Yes, Ma’am.”
It isn’t safe! Now, promise.
“Yes Ma’am.” Anything, if you’ll just go.
Truth? She so weirded me out that I only went back that one time, just to check but man, she is su
spicious. It’s not like I’ve found Dell there either, lady, so chill.
You know I can hear your thoughts.
“That’s bull!” What can she do if I say bullshit? Face it, lady, you can’t hurt me. You’re dead. Still, I close my eyes and make the sign of the cross like this is a vampire and that will get rid of her, but she doesn’t go. She isn’t done. Her cold shape hangs over the bed. And she begins.
Things happen down there in the dark. Terrible things.
“I know!”
You only think you do. Then she surprises me. Biggie dropped a pot of boiling water on herself, we didn’t know that was the beginning. Dakin should have moved those sinks out to the carriage house that very day, but lazy Little Manette wanted her white things boiled. Bedding. Double damask dinner napkins. Everything, so the tubs stayed where they were.
And then my poor Teddy. Oh, oh!
“Aunt Rosemary told all about it, so don’t.” If only she would stop!
Be quiet, boy, and let me make my point. Nine children, eight live births, and boys were a mystery to that vain, dainty, self-centered fool I spawned! Boys. Trouble simmering, just fixing to boil over and explode. Boys love secret places, going where they can’t be seen. Bad things happen then. You should know.
Why does this make me feel guilty?
I know what you’ve been up to, child. Be still. If my Teddy had been playing out in the open where we could see him, oh, oh!
A great big groan comes out of her.
You and your secret places. I lost my darling boy! Dakin Junior was born haughty, and Randolph, well, he had itchy feet, and my Teddy was so easy that his mother didn’t care a fig for him. He was my favorite, born sweet. But Everett was born sickly, and sickly was perfect for Little Manette. That child sucked up all the love in her the minute they cut the cord.
While my poor Teddy was abandoned, and then he … nobody knew until they heard the screams … the baby burned bright down there in his own little hell, and we didn’t know, we didn’t know! He died in the shadows under the porch where you and that heathen stranger …
