A Widow's Curse

by Phillip DePoy

  He went to his room; I went to mine. We both closed our doors.

  Instantly, every sound outside, every creak of the floorboards, every thump on the roof took a beat out of my heart. I was more awake than I had been all day, and I could actually feel adrenaline diluting my blood as it pounded through me.

  I kicked off my shoes and lay down on the bed fully clothed and on top of the covers. The little glass lamp on the bedside table didn’t give much light to the room, but I left it on.

  I tried to breathe slowly, counting my breaths as I exhaled, but every sound broke my concentration and caught my breath in my throat.

  I felt hot.

  I spent ten minutes trying to decide what to read, but nothing seemed interesting. I thought of getting out of bed and doing a few sit-ups and push-ups, but inertia kept me in bed.

  Every time a random thought would leap out of the shadows and into my skull, I’d have to fight it off as if it were a bat trying to eat my brain.

  I couldn’t say when I finally drifted off to sleep.

  But the violent explosion of breaking glass is what woke me back up.

  I threw myself out of bed. Still in my clothes and my stocking feet, I moved as silently as I could to the door. I glanced at my watch. It wasn’t even nine o’clock yet.

  As I turned the handle of my bedroom door, I could hear noises downstairs. Every sound I made was like thunder: floorboards complaining, hinges screaming, my own breathing like a hurricane.

  I was hoping I’d find Andrews in his own doorway, but his door was closed. By the time I stood at the top of the stairs, I could clearly hear someone walking around in my living room.

  I stood for a moment, trying to plan how I might attack the intruder.

  I heard him in the far corner of the room; I heard him lift the lid of Conner’s trunk.

  What was he looking for there? He’d already cleaned it out. Maybe he thought there was a secret compartment. He would never know that the secret compartment was in my mother’s windowsill. That thought made me consider going back into my room, barring the door, and waiting until the intruder went away, frustrated at not finding the coin.

  But of course I had to stop him. He’d murdered a man; he would stop at nothing.

  I drew in an enormous breath and called on all the demon anger I had stored at the back of my brain.

  “Stop!” I bellowed.

  I heard the man downstairs stumble and take a short gasp.

  I also heard Andrews fall out of bed.

  “Don’t move!” I shouted, almost as loudly as before. “Sit down on the floor.”

  I started down the staircase, blood pounding in my ears, skin tingling with rage. Before I was halfway down, I saw the man bolt past the bottom of the stairs, heading toward the front door in the clear kitchen light.

  “Stop!” I screamed again, so violently that it clawed my throat.

  The man was desperately trying to figure out the lock. The front door was still secured. I took a few more steps down and could see that he’d gained access to the house by smashing in the living room window that looked out onto the front porch.

  Suddenly, I heard Andrews behind me.

  “We’ve got a gun,” he said, clearly still half-asleep.

  “We don’t have a gun,” I said instantly.

  The man turned. He was carrying a cricket bat. He snarled but did not speak. He was something trapped in a corner, less than human.

  Shadows obscured his face. He was dressed in thrift-store rags—torn jeans, a flannel shirt three sizes too big, a wool cap. The look made his weapon surreal. But it was just the kind of thing to use if you wanted to break a thick window and didn’t care about the noise—or if you wanted to make a dent the size of a brick in the back of someone’s head.

  “We do, in fact, have a gun.” Andrews came up beside me on the stairs, aiming a small silver barrel at the intruder. “Hey! He’s got a cricket bat!”

  “I know,” I said, trying to get my bearings.

  “Put it down and have a seat on the floor,” Andrews said calmly, pointing his weapon directly at the man’s chest.

  The intruder erupted, a howl escaping him that shook what was left of my windows. He spun around to face the door again and with one crashing blow of his bat knocked the handle and the lock off my front door.

  It was a wild, desperate gesture. The locking mechanism remained intact, and of course the door opened inward, so it would have been nearly impossible for him to force it out. When it wouldn’t open, he screeched again and came toward us with the bat, pounding the stairs.

  Andrews fell backward; I wondered that his gun didn’t fire. Whether I was too frightened or too stupid to move didn’t matter ultimately. Standing my ground seemed to confuse the man at the bottom of the stairs.

  He grunted, not quite knowing what to do next.

  “I’ll shoot!” Andrews managed from his reclined position.

  The man snorted, shook his head, and walked toward the window he had broken.

  Andrews got to his feet and sighed.

  “You’re not going to stop him?” he asked me.

  “You’re not going to shoot at him?” I countered.

  He held out his hand. He showed me his cell phone. It had a thick antenna, which almost looked like the barrel of a small pistol. I remembered his telling me he had to use it when he was making calls from the mountain, a special attachment of some sort—good for communication, completely useless as a firearm.

  The man was scrambling out the window. A bit of his shirt caught on a shard of glass. I thought he cut himself a bit on the back of his hand. He thumped onto the front porch before Andrews and I were able to mobilize.

  We clattered down the stairs, only to see the man lumber across the lawn in the early moonlight.

  “Well, if you can’t use that thing to shoot at that man,” I stammered, glaring at Andrews, “could you at least call Skidmore? Didn’t you just say that Skidmore ought to be on your—”

  But he had already hit the speed-dial button.

  Skidmore was in the process of asking us to describe the events of the break-in for a third time when Melissa came into the kitchen.

  “Got a blood sample and a tissue sample,” she said, holding up what looked like small sandwich bags. “Also threads from the shirt, or whatever he was wearing.”

  “So he didn’t speak,” Skid said, making doodles on his notepad around the few words he’d jotted down. “He was dressed like a homeless man, and he had a cricket bat in his hand?”

  “Torn jeans,” I said as I had twice before, “flannel shirt—mostly red and gold—and a wool cap.”

  “And a cricket bat.”

  “It doesn’t matter how many times you say it.” I glared at Skidmore. “It won’t make any sense.”

  “Sorry, Dr. Devilin,” Melissa said gingerly. “But I don’t believe I’ve yet heard you mention his shoes.”

  “Shoes?” I looked at Andrews.

  “Hang on.” Andrews raked his hand through a blond wreckage of hair. “He wasn’t wearing sneakers or work boots or anything that went with the rest of his outfit.”

  “He wasn’t?” I was at a loss.

  “He was wearing Marks and Spencer oxfords.” Andrews could not believe what he was saying, and he was more pleased with himself than I had ever heard him. “He was wearing dress shoes from England.”

  “What?” I thought I’d heard him wrong. “Are you sure?”

  “They were my first adult footwear; wore them for my confirmation. They don’t look like any other shoes in the world, and I’ll never forget them.”

  “Confirmation?” I blinked. “As what?”

  “In the Church of England, when a boy turns twelve,” Andrews began.

  “Could we stick to the shoes for a minute,” Skid intervened. “You’re saying he was wearing fancy dress shoes from England?”

  “The jeans and work shirt were a disguise.” I was certain of it; I found I’d suspected it all along once
I said it out loud. That would explain his not speaking and deliberately odd behavior, I thought.

  Skidmore stared at me, waiting.

  “I’ve been developing a theory that doesn’t hold much water,” I admitted, “but here it is: Some Barnsley is after the coin, as I’ve said. He followed Shultz up here—your discovery of the phone calls to him might confirm that. Once here, he demanded the coin from Shultz. When Shultz didn’t have it, they argued and Shultz got the thick end of that cricket bat. Have a look at his skull, the way it’s caved in. I think you’ll see I’m right. That Barnsley came back tonight, dressed in such a manner as to hide his true identity. He’s the murderer.”

  “Because of this old silver coin from England.” Skid hadn’t moved.

  “Wales,” Andrews corrected.

  “Because of a curse that one of your kin put on it.” Skid shook his head and folded up his notepad.

  “All right, then,” I countered, “because it’s worth however much money Detective Huyne said it was.”

  “Shoot,” Skid said, “you’re just guessing. You’re trying to make sense of something that’s most likely a random event.”

  I turned a jaundiced eye on Andrews.

  “Please,” he begged Skidmore. “Now you’re just feeding his angst.”

  “I don’t know what that is,” Skidmore said, standing, “but Melissa’s got some real evidence, and my plan is to use it to get Dr. Devilin out from under suspicion of murder and, in the process, get the aforementioned Atlanta policemen off my ass.”

  “Your language really has gotten worse since you’ve become sheriff,” Andrews said absently.

  Skid stared.

  “Do you two make these things up before you see me just to vex my mind?” He squinted.

  “What?” Andrews didn’t know what he’d said to vex the sheriff.

  “You got some plywood you can nail up over that window for tonight?” Skid was on his way to the door.

  “I’ll find something.”

  He stopped with his hand on the open, broken front door.

  “I’m going to leave Melissa’s squad car in your yard tonight,” he said without turning my way. “That’s why we brought two cars.”

  “It’s locked, though, so you can’t get anything out of it,” Melissa volunteered.

  “You know you can’t go anywhere now, right, Fever?” Skid still wasn’t looking at me. “I mean it this time.”

  “I understand what you’re saying,” I responded.

  He offered me a low, exasperated mumble—completely unintelligible—then pulled the door open and headed toward his car.

  Not five minutes later, I was on the road to Hek and June’s house. I knew I would wake them, but I was angry enough to break down the door if I had to.

  Andrews had all but stood in the doorway to prevent my leaving, but when I told him to come with me, he declined.

  I insisted. I wasn’t going to leave him in the house alone.

  “Aren’t you afraid the guy will come back?” Andrews said, arms folded tightly against the chilled air.

  “With every light in the house on and a police car on the lawn?” I said. “Not likely.”

  “What about the open window?”

  “Close the curtains and shove a chair up against them to hold them shut until we get back. I’m not planning to be gone long.”

  Without much more argument, Andrews gave in, pulled on a jacket, and ran after me out the front door to my truck.

  I spun the tires and scattered mud, some of it onto Melissa’s squad car.

  “What do you think you’re going to get out of Hek and June that you haven’t already?” Andrews sank down into the passenger seat.

  “You don’t understand.” I ground my teeth around the words. “They know everything. They know about the coin, the painting, the murderer, God knows what else.”

  “What? You’re losing your mind.” He swallowed. “They don’t know all that.”

  “They know so much more than you think they do.”

  “No.” He was firm. “They know so much more than you wish they did.”

  “Maybe.”

  The road was all black water, a snaking river. Clouds cut and bisected the air, sliced at the moon. The wind was cold as a silver nail and twice as biting. Stars had no hope in the wilderness of that night and seemed to have blinked out, waiting for a more opportune sky.

  Andrews and I traveled the rest of the way to Hek and June’s house in silence. By the time we pulled up close to their door, I was tense as a bowstring, ready to snap.

  I shot out of the car. Andrews barely caught up with me as I bounded up the porch steps and began pounding on the door with the back of my fist. Yellow light from an upstairs window spilled onto the lawn and my truck behind me, but I kept pounding on the door.

  “Stop.” Andrews was whispering for some reason. “They’re up.”

  I stood poised right at the threshold, shaking a little. The rage I had built to help me deal with the intruder and the leftover adrenaline still spoiling my blood were causing minor tremors. I must have looked like a demon when Hek opened the door.

  He stared at me for less than two seconds, then nodded as if he’d been expecting me. He stood aside and opened the door wide enough for me to shove past him.

  Andrews followed, nodding politely.

  June was already in the kitchen at the percolator, wrapped in the same navy blue robe she’d had for decades, hair somehow perfect even under the circumstances. She didn’t look up.

  “What happened?” She didn’t stop scooping coffee into the metal basket inside the pot.

  It wasn’t at all a strange first thing to say to me. In Blue Mountain if the phone rang after midnight or, worse, someone came to your door, it only meant something wrong had happened.

  Nothing good ever came to the door after midnight.

  “Someone just broke into my house.” I sat at the kitchen table, more from habit than from a genuine desire to sit down. “He broke out my living room window, went through my house, and threatened my life.”

  “Mine, too.” Andrews sat beside me, not certain of the proper behavior for such an odd convocation.

  “You remember Dr. Andrews.” I inclined my head in his direction.

  “We heard about your Mr. Shultz,” Hek said, taking a seat opposite me at the table.

  Hek had thrown a flannel shirt on over his T-shirt, but nothing covered his long johns. He was wearing indoor/outdoor slippers that, obviously, someone had given him for Christmas.

  “Bad business.” Hek stared at the tabletop as if he were trying to read it. “So what is it you want to know?”

  “What is it I want to know?” I repeated, hoping to drive my astonishment into his brain. “I want to know all the things you wouldn’t tell me about this mess when I came over here just the other day.”

  “About Conner.” June plugged in the percolator.

  “Yes.” I could barely keep myself from exploding. “About Conner.”

  “He’s upset,” June explained to Hek, taking a seat beside him. “Coffee be ready in a minute.”

  “Ordinarily, I stay calm about this sort of thing,” I began, voice strained, “and I believe I’m very patient.”

  Hek coughed. It turned into a laugh immediately.

  “You can believe the funniest things about yourself,” he finally managed to tell me. “You don’t have the patience God gave a moth.”

  “I don’t know what that means and I don’t care,” I began.

  “He’s unhappy because somebody broke his window.” June was doing her best to inform Hek.

  “No,” I insisted. “I’m unhappy because someone killed a man in my house and then came back to try and kill me. This has nothing to do with a window.”

  “I’ve got some glass out in the shed,” Hek told me calmly. “We’ll see what we can do about that window tomorrow or the next day. You got some plywood you can put up over it in the meantime?”

  “I’m not
here about the window!”

  The percolator responded with a gurgle. The rest of the room remained silent.

  “He wants to know about Conner,” June said at last. “About those things.”

  “I expect he does.” Hek took in a deep breath. “That coffee ready?”

  June got up and stood by the pot, hoping to make it work faster.

  “I believe it was 19 and 42,” Hek began. “Now, you understand Junie wasn’t hardly born yet and I was no more than a mite.”

  “So how do you know this story?” I leaned forward. “How do you have this information.”

  “From your dad,” June said quietly. “Mostly.”

  The “mostly” implied someone else. I assumed it was my mother. June rarely talked about her.

  “Okay.” I was willing to let that part go if Hek was going to tell me what he knew. “In 1942—”

  “Conner, it’s been said, was strangely compelled to travel over to Adairsville, to the Barnsley estate. They were having an auction.”

  “The family had almost nothing by then.” June stared at the coffeepot. “Funny how having lots of money and then losing it seems sadder than never having money at all.”

  “Conner went to the Barnsleys’.” I tried not to sound as irritated as I was.

  “Yes, he did.” Hek nodded once. “He was said to have gone there to bid on several items at that auction.”

  “Said he wanted to buy some thing that were of ‘immense personal value’ to him.” June put her hand on the handle of the pot. “That’s the phrase he used: ‘immense personal value.’”

  “Of course that didn’t make a lick of sense.” Hek sniffed. “We didn’t hardly know anything about the Barnsley estate, nor the family. Nobody had the least idea what Conner was talking about. Still. He traveled to the Barnsley auction, which was a trek in those days.”

  “He went by mule.” June seemed satisfied with the progress of the coffee and began taking down snow-white cups and saucers from the cupboard in front of her.

  “He bid on three items, outbid everybody—no telling how much money he gave. Then, without a single word to explain himself, he came home, locked the items in a trunk, and was never heard to speak of them again.”