Edwin would be by soon, she kept reminding herself. Perhaps he'd be able to shed light on some things, put her mind at ease. He could tell her about the woods, about the photographs they'd found in the house. And then there was the matter of the door in the cellar. What were the odds that he knew about that?
She let the steam rolling off of her coffee tickle her nose as she raised the mug to her lips. Soon you'll have some answers. She looked up at the sky, its face stained more grey than blue now. Hopefully.
Nine
“Mind if I smoke?” was the first thing out of his mouth as he joined her around back. Edwin lit up a Marlboro and sent a puff of smoke into the air with a satisfied sigh. He looked out to the woods, up at the sky, and then smiled at his hostess. “So, how have things been? With the house, I mean?”
She answered by way of a pointed silence.
Taking a longer drag, he coughed a little. “You two having problems, maybe? Trouble getting used to it?” They'd begun walking aimlessly, leaving the back of the house and trending towards the woods. He seemed apprehensive about the subtle change in their direction and eyed the woods constantly with an almost fearful vigilance. Now when he spoke he didn't even look at her, merely keeping his eyes glued to the trees as though waiting for something to jump out at him. “You said you wanted to know about Marshall and Dakota. I don't even know where to start, really. They were fine people, lovely people. Very warm.”
The woods towered beside them. The bare trees stretched high into the air, their bodies fragmenting the weak sunlight and casting long, dark shadows. It shouldn't have been so; to Kim it seemed awfully early for such shadows, and the overcast sky wasn't allowing enough light through for them. But there they were all the same, cast upon the crunchy grass like black, oily stains.
Kim shoved her hands into her pockets and lowered her gaze, watching the blades of grass go by as she walked. She spoke quietly, furtively, as if she were afraid the woods might eavesdrop. “Start from the beginning. How did you meet them?”
He ran his tongue across his yellowed molars, falling into deep thought. This single question launched Edwin into a reminisce of nearly an hour, wherein he recounted his friendship with Marshall and Dakota Reed. There were countless tangents along the way, so many that Kim had some trouble keeping things straight. But she retained the broader strokes of his talk and felt, by the time they started back towards the house almost an hour later, that she had a semi-faithful caricature of the previous owners built up in her head.
Edwin must have smoked half a pack of cigarettes while they spoke. Whether he was simply that addicted or the conversation necessitated a sort of crutch Kim was unsure. He was silent for a time before starting, looking deep into the woods whose edges they were skirting like he was searching for the best starting point.
“I met Marshall when we were just kids. We were both straight outta the Navy, the two of us. Had served together during our last deployment and got to be pretty good friends. Well, coming back home, we settled in around this area. Has always been quiet like this, unpeopled n' such. It's strange to look around at these woods, at these open spaces and find them unchanged. But that's exactly what it is. This place ain't changed a bit in almost sixty years, I reckon. Sometimes I like it that way...” He busied himself, lighting a fresh cigarette. He didn't take a drag at once, but instead watched the tip burn away into embers for a short time. “Sometimes I don't like it. Can't say why, except that it's a little disorienting sometimes. Take, for instance, these trees here. They've always been dead, all of 'em, as far back as I can remember. Never seen a single leaf in these here woods. Some would call that peculiar, and I don't say I would disagree, though some tree expert out there could probably give a mighty pretty-sounding explanation for why these trees are still standing this way after so many years and so little growth.
“Anyway, we settled into this area, the two of us. Built our homes, stayed relatively close so we could keep in touch. And we married. My wife, God rest her soul, was actually a friend of Dakota's. That's how we all met. It was like a fairytale in that way, an idealized sorta life. Me and my wife would come by for long visits with the two of them, would have cookouts, go on little trips and such. But then things changed.”
Kim tensed. “What happened? The Reeds changed?”
“No. My wife became pregnant.” He wet his lips and smoothed out the front of his faded jacket against his bulbous paunch. “We were young back then. Had good jobs, though, nice houses, all that. But something money can't buy is a child. And when me and Rhonda had our son, well, I suppose Marshall and Dakota figured it was their turn to follow suit. And they tried for a few years there, they were hopeful. A child never came, though.” He shook his head, flicking away a cone of ash. “Some people, you know, they just ain't blessed in that way. God only sends children where He sees fit. He's never been much for requests. And well, let's say that Dakota, especially, didn't take so kindly to that fact. They kept trying until they got on in years. It was their hill to die on, the one thing they couldn't let go. They had a marvelous life out here, you gotta understand. Everything was picture perfect. But so long as that one piece was missing they couldn't be happy. I don't think they ever determined whose fault it was-- that is, who was infertile, but, uh, it was something that plagued them to the very end and put a strain on their marriage.” He cleared his throat. “Even now, years later, it doesn't feel right to talk about it. Feel like I'm talkin' behind their backs. And it's like I said to you, this place, well, nothin' ever changes here, so in a way, it's like I expect them to still linger on around here somewhere. I expect to come 'round here one day and wave to 'em from the driveway, like they never went anywhere to begin with.
“But a course they did go somewhere, no doubtin' that. And maybe it's because it happened out here, in this place where things never seemed to change at all, that it seemed so damn queer to me when they did. It was autumn-time, almost eight years back, that me and my wife first thought something might be wrong. They weren't returning our calls. In their younger days they were avid travelers like us, but as the years wore on they lost their taste for all that. They got to be home-bodies, always here in this house, workin' on it. Hell, it got so that they wouldn't even come over to our place any longer for cookouts or movies. We still visited at that time, still saw them at least a couple of times a month, but when they stopped answering our calls, we couldn't help but think something was up. We did some drive-bys, and we saw the truck was still there in the drive. Figured they just didn't want to talk to us; maybe they were having difficulties, or we'd done something to offend 'em. But then we stopped by and knocked on the door, looked in the windows.
“It's surreal to think back on it now, but when I found one of their doors open I walked in and shouted out for them. Was worried that something bad had happened, that they'd hurt themselves or God knows what. But we looked and looked and, believe it or not, they were nowhere to be found. There was no sign that anyone had been living in the house for a few months at that point, in fact. Checked their meters, their taps; seemed to me that they'd up and gone around the time they'd first stopped taking our calls. For that matter, I came upon their answering machine and found the same damn messages I'd left there weeks previous.” He loosed an exaggerated shudder. “I hope you can forgive me for saying so, but it was the scariest goddamn thing I've ever known, standing in that empty house with my wife, playing back those messages, loads of them, and knowing they hadn't been in that house for a few months.”
Kim nodded. “So, did they leave any clues behind as to where they'd gone?”
Edwin shook his head firmly at this. “Not a one, I tell ya. And that was even after the sheriff came through from the next county over with one of his deputies and turned the house upside down. After a long, hard look they theorized the two of 'em had simply bailed on the house. Now, I knew better than that. It wasn't like 'em. They loved that house like a child, would never have left it. But their truck was still there,
so we knew they couldn't have gone anywhere. I mean, it's almost an hour's drive to the nearest grocery store in these parts, there was just no explaining where they might've gone without a car. I begged the sheriff to search the woods, and I even went in there and helped them do it. We had a search party some fifteen or twenty strong, but we didn't find a thing. Not a one. Sheriff interviewed some of their other friends and acquaintances as a last resort, hoping that maybe they'd said something to someone before just dropping off the radar, but if those people did know anything, and I'm not saying that they did, then they didn't say nothing. Dead ends all around. Short while later the case went cold and seemingly everyone lost interest. Oh, in the years that passed I made sure to drive past the house on occasion. Made sure no one had messed with anything, hoped that they might suddenly return from wherever the hell they'd gone off to. But it never happened.
“Flash forward to a few months ago, I get a call from some fella at a legal office, saying the Reeds have been declared dead in absentia and I'm now the executor of their estate. Well, I wasn't too thrilled about that news. I'd always held out hope. But when a man in a thousand dollar suit gives you all their belongings and tells you they're good and dead, well, you tend to believe him. And so I fixed her up, made sure things were still working. Cleared out all of their things, sold 'em off. And then I put her on the market as quickly as I could. You understand that owning a house like this one was just too much for me. Too many memories, too much sadness tied to it. I didn't want nothing to do with it, was willing to sell it at a loss if only it meant getting rid of it. And I wanted to put the whole thing behind me. I didn't want to keep driving by that house, hopin' and wonderin' if one day they'd turn up. Made no sense to. And here we are, it seems. Here we are.” He put out his cigarette against the nearest tree trunk. “Does that answer any of your questions?”
It certainly answered some of the questions on her mind. What it didn't cover was all of the freaky shit she'd had to put up with since moving in. Taking in a deep breath, Kim tried to shove the conversation in that direction. “So, why did you guys move out to the middle of nowhere? Why did they like this area so much, the Reeds?”
Edwin tugged on his collar. “They were fiercely private, those two. They liked their alone time, their solitude. A house as isolated as that one just suited 'em, I guess. Like I told you, especially in their older years, they were home-bodies. Hardly ever set foot outside their own property. They even took up hunting and gardening so that they wouldn't have to go out for groceries as much. Funny though, the deer don't run through this stretch quite like I remember. In fact, I don't know that they ever did, not through these dead woods.”
“You said at the showing that there'd been a house on this land previously, and that it'd been torn down when this one was built. Can you tell me anything about that?”
Growing increasingly wary at her line of questioning, he had little to offer on this subject. “Don't think I even saw it before it got knocked down. It was a tottering little thing, if I recall, but they cleared it out in a hurry and built right over its foundation.” His greying brown combover was ruined by a strong gust of the breeze. He batted it back down onto his greasy head with a frown.
“I see.” Kim worked over her lower lip. “Tell me, did the Reeds have any family they kept in touch with?”
“No, I don't think so. They didn't get along with their parents, either of them, and I'm sure they passed on years ago anyhow. They had siblings, maybe, but I didn't know them well and heard that they'd stopped talking to them, too, years and years ago. They lived out here alone, kept a small number of friends and were content to leave things that way. Never were hard to please, those two.”
Kim jumped at the mention of other friends. “These other friends of theirs-- could you possibly give me their names, phone numbers? I wouldn't mind speaking to them--”
“Now, hold on a minute,” said Edwin, turning to face her, looking stern now for the first time all day. “Why are you so interested in all of this? Now, if you've gone and found something, something that'll help me get to the bottom of what happened to 'em , then I wanna know about it. What's this all about?”
Kim evaded. “No, nothing like that. I'm just curious, that's all. I swear. I haven't found anything like that. A few old pictures is all.”
His gaze narrowed. “Pictures of what?”
She couldn't give a good answer to this. What was she supposed to say? Pictures full of masked freaks? A photo with a threat scribbled onto the back? She couldn't bring herself to say anything about the photos. They seemed irrelevant to her now. “You know, just old pictures,” she said. “I was just hoping I could speak to other people who knew them. More than one perspective would be interesting.”
Edwin cleared his throat. “I'm not sure that it would be very appropriate for me to just give you people's names and phone numbers like that.” He hesitated a little. “I could give them to you, maybe, but only if you promise not to tell 'em I was the one to give you the information. I don't much keep in touch with most of these people. But maybe I could pass it on. I still feel a little bad about selling you this house without your knowing what happened here. That is, unless you're going to use it to harass them or somesuch, because then it's absolutely no deal. You and your husband seem like nice folk and I have nothing against your tryin' to learn more about the house's history. And without Marshall and Dakota, well, there wouldn't be a house to begin with.”
“That would be great!” She thanked him profusely and waited as he swiped around on his phone, digging through his contacts for the names and numbers in question. She added them to her own and felt a great deal of excitement wash over her. “This is so excellent, thanks. No funny business, I swear.”
“No problem.”
They were back at the house now, and Kim still hadn't received all of the information she'd been hoping for. She knew a few things about the owners and such, but Edwin hadn't hinted at anything unsettling or supernatural in nature. For an instant she felt a gut-wrenching fear. See? He didn't mention anything about mask-wearing apparitions or weird nightmares. Nothing about the house's bad vibes in his entire speech. Maybe you are just imagining it. Maybe you're going insane. A raindrop struck her shoulder as she stopped near the fire pit and turned to him afresh. She needed to get this out, to steer the conversation back to what was really bothering her. “I'll let you go, Edwin. But before I do, I have one last question for you.” She put on a smile, but her lips trembled too much for it to stay long. “In this house, have you... or the Reeds, for that matter, ever noticed anything... off?”
Edwin stuck his hands in his pockets and then motioned with them, giving the front of his coat a flap. “What do you mean, exactly?”
“Have you... ever seen things.... around here? Things that you can't, well... explain?” She knew how she looked right then. It was embarrassing to have to ask, but if she didn't get something from him, she'd explode.
His gaze firmed a little, then he looked up to the sky, a raindrop striking his cheek. “Guess I was right about that rain,” he said, offering a little sigh. “Strange things, eh?” He kicked at a clod of dirt near the pit, watching as it burst into dust upon the tip of his boot. “Well, let me tell you what I think about strange things in these parts, young lady. The quiet, the open space out here... it can be disorienting if you're not careful. Especially for a city girl like you. And with these trees here...” He motioned at the woods, now to his back, and appraised them from his periphery with a deepening of the creases at the corners of his eyes. “At night, they cast those tall, tall shadows, they do. One never quite gets used to that. There ain't a thing in these woods, like I said, but at night, when the moon is right, well, you can sometimes see things. Things that ain't supposed to be there, maybe looking out at ya.” He cleared his throat, pulling one of his hands out of his pockets and shaking it before him playfully. “That's not to say that you're seein' something real out there, miss. No, rather, these woods can
play tricks on your eyes. They play tricks on the best of us. So don't take them too seriously. You'll be seeing things that aren't really there and losing sleep over it otherwise.” He chuckled nervously.
“Are the woods dangerous?” she asked, kneading her hands together.
“Dangerous? If you get lost in them, maybe.” He gulped, patting his forehead dry. She thought it strange that he should be sweating. It was cool out, breezy. His face seemed extra pale in the grey light and he began quickly for his truck. “Stay out of them at night, of course. Could lose your way or, uh... scare yourself unnecessarily.”
Trying to get him to talk any further about these “unnecessary scares” was like trying to draw blood from a stone. Citing the now increasing rain as an excuse, Edwin said he simply had to get going and refused her invitations inside for coffee. He waved a somber goodbye through the windshield and pulled away just as the rain began to pour.
Ten
The rain was short-lived. The rumbling clouds said their piece over the course of five or ten minutes and then fell silent. The thirsty ground sucked it all up, so that by the time a freshly-showered and sober Julian stepped out to clean the fire pit, there were precious few signs that it'd rained at all.
Kim had gone inside to steep in a bath, rebuffing sarcastic questions from Julian about how her talk with Edwin had gone. On the one hand, she felt like she'd learned so much. On the other, she felt as though she hadn't leaned a damn thing. He'd grown nervous in the end, gone in a hurry, but precisely why that was she could only guess. She figured that the man was superstitious, that perhaps he had seen something in the house or the woods that'd set him ill at ease. Something that he didn't care to revisit in his mind or speak aloud. Maybe he'd seen that masked figure outside just like she had. Or maybe he'd seen something else.
She meditated in the bath, her head swimming in uncertainty. When the water cooled she went for a warm shower. When she was done, her skin was rosy and her fingers pruned. Still, a persistent cold lingered. She wiped away the steam on their new mirror and looked herself over. Then, running a comb through her hair, she worked out a few tangles. All the while she focused on the things Edwin had told her and tried to convince herself that the sighting the previous night was just a fluke, an illusion.
Black Acres- The Complete Collection Page 6
