Southern Gothic

by Stuart Jaffe

  “So, where can I read it?”

  “Follow me.”

  Leon brought Max to a computer terminal set up in a cubicle. A few taps at the keyboard, and the story appeared. Before Max sat next to Leon to read the piece, his heart jumped. On the screen he saw:

  Kings of Dante

  by Bill Sydney

  for my friend, Cal Baxter

  “Leon, this is what I’ve been looking for. Now, I’ve just got to find out who Bill Sydney is.”

  “That’s easy. I already know. Bill Sydney is a pseudonym used by William Sydney Porter. He was a prolific short story writer and went by a lot of different names.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Sure you have. His most famous pseudonym was O. Henry.”

  Max’s world skipped a frame. “Wait, what? William Sydney Porter is O. Henry? The writer? Gift of the Magi. That guy?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Max stared at the computer screen, the letters burning into his mind. O. Henry had dedicated a story to Cal Baxter. They knew each other.

  “Guess I’ve got to go learn about O. Henry,” Max said.

  Leon patted him on the shoulder. “I know the perfect book.”

  True to his word, Leon provided Max with an excellent biography of O. Henry that went far in-depth into the man’s life. Straight from the opening pages, Max knew this was the right nugget to follow because it turned out that O. Henry came from Greensboro, North Carolina.

  Born in 1862 with the real name William Sydney Porter, he lived in Greensboro for much of his youth. Sharing the last name Porter barely registered in Max’s mind. He had learned long ago that certain names, Porter among them, were so common that to get excited about a possible connection meant getting disappointed more often than not.

  As William grew older, he spent his early adult years wandering around from job to job trying to find a place to fit in. He worked at his uncle’s drugstore and earned his pharmacist license at nineteen. He sketched portraits of customers, and though the biography did not mention it specifically, Max thought it fairly certain that William tried to sell some of these sketches. Probably ticked off the uncle but not enough to get fired. Still, he ended up traveling down to Texas where he tried his hand working on a sheep ranch, doing everything from shepherding to cooking to entertaining — somewhere along the line he had become a decent guitarist.

  Max rolled his neck to relieve a sore spot when he noticed how dark the library had become. He checked his watch — 5:37 pm. Most people had left for the day. Leon had left and Max never even noticed. Later in the evening, students would fill up the space as they worked on papers and projects.

  The sky grew darker while he sat there, and he considered packing up the books and going home. But the lure of his research overrode his desire to avoid driving in bad weather.

  “When I’m done with the O. Henry book,” he promised.

  Sticking his head back into the book, Max worked diligently for two more hours. He might have continued until the library closed, but he heard something that stopped him — silence.

  Not the quiet of a library, but a true absence of sound. No buzz of lighting. No hums of electricity. Not one fan blowing or heater pumping. Not a gentle murmur of conversation between the stacks or the soft click-clack of a librarian typing on a computer. Nothing. As if all the sound in the world had ceased.

  Max’s body stilled as his eyes searched the darkening library. He couldn’t see far, though, due to the numerous rows of books and a few thick posts. On one post, a fire alarm hung. If he bolted for it right away, he could set it off and force everyone outside. But he didn’t move. He didn’t like the idea of taking such a bold action without knowing what he faced. For all he knew, the Hulls had sent a witch after him, and that person stood right behind the post he would be running for. He needed more information.

  Off to his left, the stairwell doors flew open without a sound. The lights in the stairwell flashed sporadically. Max squinted, trying to make who had come. Not who, he saw — but what.

  A large beast stepped forward like the Minotaur from the Greek myths. It hulked in the doorway, its massive shoulders covered in hair, long snout dripping with mucus, and thick muscles bulging with strength. Unlike the myths, though, this creature bore two ram’s horns — one on either side of its head. Ram’s horn? Max recalled a flashing image from Baxter House. The creature turned its eyes — dark, cloudy eyes — upon Max.

  Max’s cell phone buzzed.

  The sudden noise jolted him. He sat at the table, his heart racing, his mouth dry, as the quiet bustle of the library went on around him. He heard a librarian speaking with a student. He saw the well-lit stairs as two young women walked through — one accidentally bumping her large purse against the post that had no fire alarm but rather a taped-flier for the Drama Department’s latest production of “No Exit”.

  Max’s head felt stuffy as if he had been asleep. He wanted to accept that as the simple answer — he had dreamed while asleep. But it had felt real. Not the way a dream that feels real feels real but rather the way reality feels real. Because no matter how real a dream may seem, upon waking, the dream faded. Occasionally, the false reality of the dream lasted a short while, but no matter what, the dream faded. Otherwise, there would be people walking around unsure of whether they were asleep or awake. Max guessed there might be a few mentally ill people with that problem, but not him — he knew he had not been asleep.

  The phone flashed the receiving of a text message. Max stared at it, knowing that once he moved his body, all sense of whatever had happened would fall apart. The full weight of the real world would crash down and destroy the delicate balance his head walked between real and possible-dream. No, he thought, it couldn’t have been a dream. But it couldn’t have been real either. Ghosts, witches, curses, two-hundred-year-old men, covens, even whatever Leed was — Max could accept all of that. He had experience it all. But a demon Minotaur? No. That went too far.

  Max finally picked up the phone. As expected, the tactile sensation hardened reality around him. He had no idea what had happened, but he knew the phone with its message, that was reality. He glanced at the screen — Sandra.

  Tapping on the phone, he brought up the message. It read: Found Freeman’s house. Then she gave an address in Greensboro.

  Chapter 12

  Max drove Route 40 towards Greensboro. From the library, he knew it would be around forty minutes which gave him time. He kept remembering that creature, the way it stared at him, the way it filled in the stairwell, the way it soaked up all sound.

  Shaking off the memory, he called Sandra and set his phone on speaker. “Hi, hon. Great work. I’m heading out to Greensboro now,” he said.

  “It was nothing.”

  Despite his wracked emotions, he grinned. Sandra had worked hard to track down that address — once more proving how indispensable she was to this outfit. As with their marriage, they were a team in this business, and as with their marriage, only when they worked together did things ever turn out right.

  “How’d your research go?” she asked.

  His grin lifted to a full smile. She understood exactly why he had called. A forty minute drive after tons of research — he needed to put all the pieces into place and she knew he thought best when he thought out loud. She had offered herself as a sounding board.

  “What do you know about O. Henry?”

  “The writer?”

  “He wrote a story dedicated to Cal Baxter. To start with, O. Henry’s real name is William Porter.” Max went through the early years quick and got to the point where William headed down to Texas. “After a few more years bouncing around jobs, he got married and ended up in Austin working at the First National Bank. He was a lousy banker. For starters, he wasn’t very careful with bookkeeping.”

  Sandra chuckled. “That seems like a major problem for a banker.”

  “Didn’t help that he played rather loose with banking ethics. Not a problem
if you’re the CEO of Goldman Sachs.”

  “Not at all. You cheat the entire country and we give you a bailout.”

  “But when you’re low man on the totem pole, and it’s the 1890s, not so good for you. He was accused of embezzlement and fired. Weird thing though, they never indicted him.”

  “You think the bank made him take the fall for something they did?”

  “Hold on, this gets messier. At this point, he moves his family to Houston. Some of the weekly dabbling he had done with writing caught the eye of an editor at the Houston Post. He went on to write for them regularly, and famously got a lot of his ideas by hanging out in hotel lobbies and eavesdropping. All seemed to be going fine until the First National Bank of Austin got audited. The Feds found out about the embezzlement and somebody had to take the fall. Now, get this part, this is crazy. His father-in-law posts his bail and a day before his trial, something clicks in him and he runs. Heads to New Orleans and then finds his way to Honduras. At that time, Honduras had no extradition treaty with the US, so he was safe.”

  “This is the guy who becomes O. Henry?”

  “I know, it’s amazing. All this is happening to him, and he’s writing and getting stories published the whole time. And it might have gone on like that, but his wife was ill. She’d suffered from tuberculosis since before they were married, but now she was dying. So, he came back to Austin to see her and turned himself in. The father-in-law actually posted bail again, just so O. Henry could see his wife. In the end, he was sentenced to five years and shipped off to a prison in Ohio.”

  “But that’s not the end for us.”

  “No. Because he continued to write stories, and as he had all along, he continued to get them published under numerous pseudonyms, but the O. Henry pseudonym had become the most popular — supposedly the name came from one of his favorite guards. For a handful of years in the early 1900s, he wrote hundreds of stories. It was incredible output. But in 1910, he died. He was a heavy drinker his whole life and it finally took its toll.”

  Sandra said, “So, how did he know Cal Baxter?”

  “I haven’t a clue.” Max had reached the edge of Guilford County which meant the city of Greensboro would be only a few minutes away. “They could have met anywhere along the line, but Cal never reached the fame that O. Henry did, so there isn’t as much available about the man.”

  “Couldn’t the dedication be some other Cal Baxter?”

  “Of course. Except how many Cal Baxters were there living close to Greensboro, North Carolina at the right age and time to have known O. Henry. Even if they met in Honduras, they’d have that commonality to befriend each other over. Plus, O. Henry died in 1910 and Cal Baxter inherits all this money in 1912. Doesn’t that seem a little odd?”

  “That’s two years apart. Anybody could have died in that time and given money to Cal. I think you might be stretching, hon.”

  “That’s because I can feel there’s a connection here, I just can’t find it, yet.”

  Reading Max perfectly, Sandra asked, “What can we do to help?”

  “First, send Drummond to join me. I don’t want to be checking out a dead man’s house by myself. Not with all that’s going on. Then I want you to check deeper into O. Henry, and particularly his aliases. There’s a connection here, I promise, and maybe a fresh set of eyes will find it.”

  “You got it.”

  Before she could hang up, Max said, “Oh, and hon.”

  “Hmm?”

  “I love you.”

  He could hear her smile. “Right back at you,” she said, and ended the call.

  Max laughed as he got off the highway and started checking street signs for Madison Drive.

  Chapter 13

  By the time Drummond arrived, Max had already found the place. It sat in the middle of a suburban street complete with house upon house, cars in the driveways, numerous old trees clinging to the last of Autumn’s leaves. It was a great location for a family. Plenty of schools nearby. Access to the highway. Not too far from downtown. And Friendly Shopping Center only a few blocks north — a massive series of strip malls selling most everything a household might need.

  “Why the heck would Freeman want to live here?” Drummond asked.

  Max kept the answer to himself — Drummond wouldn’t understand. Until recently, this was exactly where Max and Sandra had wanted to live. Not this specific street or city, but this life — the two-story home with a neat yard and a driveway. The neighborhood filled with the hope of children going off to school, playing in the street during the summers, ringing the doorbell on Halloween, and offering to shovel out cars in the winter. Freeman wanted to live here for the same reason Max and Sandra wanted to live here — for the promise of the future, for the blind faith that someday soon they could build that Norman Rockwell world around them, instead of being plagued with the Hulls and all their warped machinations.

  Drummond stepped through the walls and Max heard the front door click open. He entered the house — empty. No furniture in the rooms, no paintings on the walls. Max checked the light switch and a ceiling mounted dome lit up.

  “Electricity’s still on,” he said. No heat, though.

  Max walked further in, his footsteps sounding hollow. He peeked out the front bay window. No For Sale sign in the yard.

  “Doesn’t look like anybody knew he was planning on leaving.”

  Drummond tipped his hat back as he looked around. “He wasn’t leaving. Not yet. Remember now, he’s jumped addresses several times. Guy like that doesn’t settle into a place. This location was probably to keep up appearances that he was a normal fellow. He didn’t want anybody bothering him, and if Hull looked into him — which would have been done before hiring anybody to take care of Baxter House — then having recently purchased this home would look good and stable.”

  They walked deeper into the house. The kitchen cupboards had plenty of instant soup while the freezer had been stocked with microwaveable dinners. Two used coffee mugs waited in the sink.

  Upstairs Max found Sebastian’s bedroom — the only room with anything in it. A mattress on the floor, a small television sitting on a milk crate, and stacks of books. It looked like the apartment of a college student.

  “Over here,” Drummond said, leaning near one stack of books.

  Max saw the title Cabbages and Kings by O. Henry. Also in the stack, he saw The Gift of the Magi and Other Stories as well as a biography of O. Henry. “Guess we’re not the only ones thinking there’s a bigger connection to be found.”

  Next to the mattress, Max caught sight of a manila envelope. He swallowed back hard. A moment passed in which he expected to see the handwriting of Mr. Modesto on the outside and orders from the Hulls on the inside.

  Instead, Max found photographs — lots of photographs. All different sizes, all black and white, many labeled on the back. Photos of Baxter House, streets of Winston-Salem, streets of Greensboro, an old locomotive roundhouse, the covered bridge leading into Old Salem, and more.

  Drummond whistled. “You think he took all those?”

  “No,” Max said, flipping a few over. “Some of these are dated from the 1930s.”

  One photo depicted a small brick building surrounded by open fields. On the back, somebody had written — NGFS, Upper, before. Max showed it to Drummond but the ghost only shrugged. Another photo showed a railroad bridge and on the back Max found the description — Trollinger’s bridge over Haw River.

  “What is all this?” he asked.

  Drummond startled and he opened his coat pocket. He nodded at Leed, then shot out the door. Before Max had time to question him, Drummond returned. “We got trouble. Detective Rolson’s here.”

  Max wondered how Leed knew about Rolson — assuming that’s what the ghost blob said to Drummond — but that would have to wait for another time. Max gathered up the photos, stuck them in the envelope, and shoved the envelope down the back of his pants. He made sure his coat covered the envelope.

 
“You planning on talking with him?” Drummond asked, his incredulous tone unmistakable. “You do that, you’ll end up in jail.”

  “I’m planning on hiding. I just don’t want him knowing I’ve got the photos if he sees me.”

  “Well, he’s going to see you if you don’t move your ass.”

  As Rolson opened the front door, Max darted across the hall and into the opposite bedroom. There was only one place to hide — the closet. It had slats in the door, so as Max closed himself in, he could peek through the slats and see a bit of Sebastian’s bedroom.

  Drummond stood in front of the door and shook his head. “The closet? Really? Why didn’t you go out the window or up into the attic? You make one little noise and Rolson will find you here with ease.”

  Though he wanted to argue, Max knew Drummond’s last statement was right. He had to stay quiet or else Rolson would find him, in which case Drummond’s initial statement would prove to be true — Max would end up in jail.

  Rolson climbed the stairs in slow, plodding steps. Max pictured the tubby man laboring his way up, perspiring under a single-color sweater and a blazer. Though not necessary, Rolson clicked on a small penlight and inspected Sebastian’s bedroom.

  Drummond glided back toward Max. “You know, I have to hand it to this guy. If he were on the right track thinking you were the killer, he’d be doing a good job being a bug up your rear. He’s been working out what moves you might make — going back to Baxter House, coming out here — and then making sure he’s in those places to piss you off.” Max scowled. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying I’m happy about this guy, but he’s doing a good job.”

  Rolson turned his attention to the room across from Sebastian’s — the same room in which Max hid. He played his penlight around the floor, never once bothering with the closet. Stepping near one of the room’s two small windows, he rolled back and forth on his feet until he smacked his lips as if confirming this action tasted right to him. Without pause, he knelt and pulled a switchblade from his pocket. In seconds, he removed one of the floorboards.