House of Echoes: A Novel

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House of Echoes: A Novel Page 13

by Brendan Duffy


  Mrs. White, the kind old woman from the Preservation Society, had dropped off a tincture of oils for bathwater that was supposed to promote relaxation. Caroline thought she might give it a try once she finished her run.

  She wiped sweat from her eyes with the back of her hand. So damn hot, she thought.

  Bub, her own personal angel, took delightfully predictable naps, so Caroline decided to risk a short detour into the forest. A few months ago, she could never have imagined leaving the baby alone for any length of time, but they were alone on the Drop and the monitor gave her a long tether—just another way in which their lives had changed since leaving the city. This new route took her north, along the top of the slope before it dipped into the woods. It was cooler here. Caroline darted over the bulging roots and between the coarse trunks with the fleet grace of a native creature. She followed the edge of a ravine downslope, the momentum and challenge of the course spurring her to run faster. This leg of her jog was reckless. The misjudgment of an inch could earn her a broken ankle, but she’d always been sure-footed, and running the forest’s gauntlet made her feel invincible.

  The forest air was wet and thick with solitude. Sound did not travel the way it was supposed to. But today Caroline only had ears for the pounding of her steps and the pulse in her temples. An undernote of smoke lingered on the breeze. It reminded her of her father’s grill, of the long summer nights of her childhood, when a Popsicle and a running sprinkler were all she needed to be incandescently happy.

  A flicker of movement to her right caused Caroline to turn her head. A large crow perched on the trunk of a fallen tree on the far side of the ravine. Its glossy black head shone blue in the scattered light, its onyx eyes watching her with a chilling predatory stillness. Her eyes were drawn upward, and she saw that the trees were full of the creatures. They stared at her as silently as gargoyles. She was so startled that she lost her footing. She tripped over a root and caught herself hard against the trunk of a massive oak. The baby monitor clipped to her waistband crunched in protest. The birds didn’t move.

  Now that she had stopped, she smelled the rancid stench of rotting flesh caught on the air. Carrion scavengers, she thought. Eaters of the dead. One of the creatures in the branches above her had a long rip of putrid sinew hanging off its beak. The sight of it, coupled with the smell, made Caroline gag, and she staggered along the edge of the ravine. She’d hurt her ankle when she tripped, and she tested it carefully, keeping one eye on the motionless birds.

  Caroline limped away from the flock of birds as quickly as she could. The stench was terrible, and she couldn’t tell if it was from the birds themselves or from whatever dead thing they’d found to feed on. She climbed over a fallen birch tree, her fingers finding purchase on the tangles of bark that had warped from its trunk. The regular course of her run would have taken her west, down the slope, but it was clear her jog was over. She wanted to get out of the forest as quickly as possible.

  The light became murky as she picked her way to the edge of the woods, streaming in hazy beams through patches in the forest’s canopy. She chanced a look over her shoulder at the birds, but she didn’t see anything other than their dark silhouettes in the high branches. She was having trouble seeing anything with distinction. Her eyes watered, and she’d caught the tang of burning things again. An acrid taste collected in the back of her throat.

  The fields were unrecognizable when she got to them. The clear summer’s day had been replaced with the rolling fog of October. Her eyes suddenly brimming, she squinted to make sense of what she was seeing.

  It wasn’t until Caroline saw the plume of black smoke billowing from the Crofts that realization ricocheted around her brain like a wayward bullet: the taste of smoke, the haze in the forest, her baby alone in his crib. That’s when the pain in her ankle disappeared and Caroline rediscovered the pace she’d been missing.

  20

  Girded by mountains, the valley was shielded from the wind and left to bake in the July sun. With the rains of past weeks forgotten, the streets and buildings were glazed with sediment from the parched fields. Ben’s Escape left twin burns of dust in its wake, as if it traveled five times its true speed.

  Deputy Simms and Mose Johnson from the gas station sat outside Harp’s General Store, facing the street and drinking something out of aluminum cans. Ben hailed them with an open palm as he drove by, but only Johnson waved in return.

  Ben didn’t know what this village meeting was about, but he was surprised that the church parking lot was even less crowded than it had been for the meeting of the Preservation Society.

  “Shouldn’t be too long,” he told Hudson. He fastened a leash to the beagle’s collar and tied it around a sapling on the edge of the thatch of trees. The dog tilted his head to one side. “Look, you’ve got shade and grass and everything,” he said, scratching Hudson under his ear.

  When he entered the church, Ben recognized nearly everyone there. Chief Stanton spoke to Walter Harp by the pulpit, and Mrs. White and Lisbeth sat next to each other at the table up at the front. The only person whom Ben hadn’t met was a prematurely bald man who approached him as soon as he entered.

  “Roger Armfield,” he said, shaking Ben’s hand. Armfield was taller than Ben and thin as a lamppost.

  “I thought there’d be more people,” Ben said. The chief and Walter Harp waved at him across the pews.

  “Oh, no, it’s usually just us,” Armfield said. “The Swannhaven Trust is made up of the heads of the, uh, the village’s first families.” Armfield looked about the same age as Ben, but his breathless way of speaking made him sound like an over-caffeinated adolescent.

  “Is that the same as the Winter Families?”

  “Oh, yes,” the man laughed, looking relieved. “I wasn’t sure you knew about that.” He leaned closer to Ben. “We’re the largest landowners and we know the village best. The chief is the chief, and Walter Harp owns the store and acts as a middleman for most of the tenant farmers. Lisbeth Goode owns the diner and is our historian. The Goodes have always kept our records. And Mrs. White can fix up almost anybody with plants she grows in her garden. I’m the town veterinarian. Being a vet might not count for much where you come from, but this is a town that has fifty times as many cows as people.” The man leaned back and guffawed.

  Ben was beginning to wonder why he was here. As a descendant of a Lowell, he was technically a member of one of the Winter Families, but that didn’t mean he belonged at a governing meeting for a village he’d moved to only a few months ago. Across the room, Lisbeth rose from the front table and began to move toward him.

  “I guess that makes sense,” Ben said. “Just doesn’t sound very democratic.”

  “Oh, dear,” Armfield said. A sheen of sweat sprang up across his forehead as he looked over his shoulder. People began to take their seats at the front table. “We’re all properly elected. We have our quirks, but that’s not one of them. After all, we fought a war over exactly that type of thing, didn’t we?” His laugh became even more strained, and Ben was relieved when Lisbeth finally reached them.

  “Glad you two have met,” Lisbeth said. She put her arms around both of them. “Let’s get started.” Ben had planned to sit in the pews, but Lisbeth guided him to a seat at the table, between Chief Stanton and herself.

  Everyone greeted Ben warmly, but he felt more out of place with every moment. He relaxed a bit when Lisbeth announced that they’d begin the meeting with a reading from the Bible. He’d come prepared for that, at least. Everyone else took out a Bible, and he pulled his from his messenger bag. The dragon-skin Bible shook the table when he placed it there.

  “We’ll take our reading from Job today,” Lisbeth said. She began to read but hesitated. Ben was still flipping through the pages to find the right passage. It’d been a while since he’d had to locate a specific verse in the Bible, but he’d practiced the day before. He looked up when he was ready and saw that Lisbeth was staring at his Bible. Everyone was, except fo
r Mrs. White, who looked only at him. When her crinkled blue eyes found his, a smile bloomed on her face. Ben was about to say something, but then Lisbeth continued with the reading.

  When the passage was finished, Chief Stanton was the first one to speak.

  “Where’d you find that Bible, Mr. Tierney?” he asked.

  “In the cellar up at the Crofts,” Ben said. “I was cleaning out some things and I found it locked in an old desk.”

  “It’s a miracle you found it,” Lisbeth said, shaking her head. “That’s Aldrich Swann’s Bible. One of the only things he took on the passage from the Old World.”

  “It looked old to me, but I didn’t realize it was that ancient.”

  “Three hundred years if it’s a day,” Mrs. White whispered. The smile she’d set on Ben remained undimmed.

  “I should be more careful with it,” Ben said. He began to feel uncomfortable again. “Maybe I shouldn’t have taken it out of the house.”

  “Nonsense,” Lisbeth said. “Take care with it, to be sure, but the good book’s not meant to die on a shelf. It’s meant to live on a lap. It’s right that you brought it, Ben,” she said. “And it’s good to have you here. Your kin used to sit at this table, and we invited you here today so you can see how the village operates.”

  “Great,” Ben said, nodding. He took the opportunity to return the old Bible to his bag.

  “Mrs. White, how are the Johnson boys?” Lisbeth asked. She opened her notebook and poised her pen above it.

  Mrs. White had been treating Mose Johnson’s sons for fevers, and they were coming along well. In her papery voice, she also reported that two of the farmers’ wives were pregnant and that she thought one of them would have twins. Ben was surprised such things were discussed at a village council meeting, but he guessed that in a place so small, everything was of interest.

  Lisbeth turned next to Walter Harp. He gave her a sheet that detailed how much milk the dairy farms had produced last month, where it had been sold, and for what price. He provided similar details for Swannhaven’s chicken and eggs, corn and vegetables and fruit. Lisbeth and the chief compared this year’s figures to last year’s. Corn was up; chickens, eggs, vegetables, and fruit were about the same; milk was down. From what Ben gathered, most farmers who worked the valley floor rented their acreage from someone else—presumably from one of the families at this table. He didn’t know if they paid rent but figured there was some arrangement. Walter Harp appeared to manage sales of milk and corn to purchasers outside Swannhaven. The rest of the production was sold via Harp’s store to other villagers. In that way, the village seemed self-sufficient.

  This brought them to Roger Armfield, who nervously related a spate of cattle deaths across the valley.

  “A sickness tore through the milk herds back in the eighties,” Lisbeth told Ben. “Lost half the herds. It began turning up again last winter. Hasn’t gotten too bad so far because we’ve been careful to quarantine the infected,” she said.

  The discussion then moved on to a problem that some of the farms on the north end of the valley were having with well water.

  The Swannhaven Trust meeting was like nothing Ben had expected. He was surprised by how interlinked all the families in the village were, but what really struck him was the way the village’s services and economy were organized. It seemed to be a combination of feudalism and farming cooperative. He’d never heard of anything quite like it.

  The meeting ended with a prayer, and the trust members began to leave. Lisbeth was quick to take Ben aside.

  “That’s how it’s done in Swannhaven,” she said. “What did you think?”

  “I have to admit, that’s not how I imagined a village council meeting,” Ben said. “I didn’t realize you’d be so involved in every aspect of the village. I guess I thought people just sat around talking about potholes and stop signs.”

  Lisbeth laughed at that. “We do things a little differently here,” she said. “But only because we need to. Trading in kind and sharing what we can is the only way a small farming village like ours can survive these days. Gotta save what money we have for gas, electricity, heating oil, and the interest to the banks.” She shook her head. “You can bet that no one in this village will hop into bed with a bank again. We need nobody but each other and the Lord. Speaking of which, you should come to Sunday service.”

  “I’ll definitely come by,” Ben said. He knew the Swanns had been religious folk, and he wanted to get a better sense of what that part of their lives had been like. “And I like that you all look out for one another.”

  “We’ve been through more together than most towns. Going all the way back to the Winter Siege during the Revolution so long ago. If you’re trying to figure out this strange little village of ours, that one hard winter is all you need to know. Folks came out of it as close as family—closer than most, I’d wager.” She suddenly smiled. “Speaking of families, I was right when I guessed that yours would be beautiful. Two handsome sons and a lovely wife for the full set. You should know that Caroline’s welcome at all our meetings.”

  The others had already left the church, but Ben could still hear their voices.

  “I’ll tell her. She just wasn’t feeling well today,” he said. “She gets these headaches.”

  “That can be hard,” Lisbeth said. “My late husband used to have something similar. The winters were always especially hard on him. Mrs. White used to fix him up with teas from her garden. It worked wonders on him.”

  “Really?” There was some commotion outside: shouts from excited voices and the rumble of cars accelerating.

  Lisbeth’s eyes also flicked toward the door as she spoke. “I know Mrs. White would be pleased to put something together for Caroline, if you like. See if it works? Always says that’s what she was put here to do.”

  “I’ll talk to her about it,” Ben said. He didn’t know how Caroline would feel about homemade therapeutic tea, but he’d try anything.

  “Mr. Tierney.” Roger Armfield had burst through the church door. “They need you,” he said. He pointed through the doors.

  “They?” Ben asked, as he walked outside.

  He shielded his eyes against the sun as he stepped out. Something outside had changed. Loud voices came from Harp’s General Store, and there was a vacant place where the chief’s police cruiser had been. He could discern Deputy Simms’s voice but not the words he shouted.

  Two pickups had pulled in front of Harp’s. Men from town squeezed into the seats and others piled into the back. Ben had never seen so many people gathered at one time on Swannhaven’s streets. He wondered where they’d come from. Deputy Simms saw Ben and began to run toward him.

  Ben didn’t know what was going on, but he got the sense that he should be moving faster. He quickly untied Hudson’s leash from where he’d fastened it and was about to lead him to the Escape when he felt a sharp rap against his shoulder.

  Deputy Simms stood behind him. “Aren’t you gonna follow them?” Simms asked, twitching his head in the direction of the two pickup trucks.

  Ben frowned at the deputy, and the younger man pointed east. Ben followed his gesture to the place between the mountains, where a maelstrom of black smoke billowed from where his house was supposed to be.

  21

  The Escape shook from the irregularities of the broken roadway, and its tires shrieked on every turn.

  Deputy Simms had managed to climb into the SUV before Ben floored the accelerator. He sat in the passenger’s seat, with his face pressed against the glass of the window to keep an eye on the smoke. Ben was thirty miles over the speed limit, but Simms either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

  “Call Cee,” Ben said, punching the voice control on the car’s steering wheel.

  “Calling Cee,” the car said.

  “Fancy car,” the deputy muttered to himself.

  Ben listened to the series of rings until Caroline’s voice mail kicked in. He disconnected and tried not to think about the ques
tions posed by an unanswered phone.

  “Did you get a call about it?” Ben asked Simms.

  “A what?” the deputy turned to him.

  “A call, a 911 call about the fire.”

  “Didn’t need to. That smoke can be seen for twenty miles. Chief took off like a shot, soon as he saw it.”

  Ben clenched his teeth. If Caroline had called in the fire, that would have meant that she and the boys were okay.

  “Were those men in the pickups the volunteers?” Ben asked. He’d passed the trucks filled with villagers the first chance he’d gotten, but he had no doubt that they were headed to the Crofts.

  “Volunteers?”

  “The volunteer fire department.”

  “No fire department in Swannhaven,” the deputy said. “We’d have to call North Hampstead to get an engine over here.”

  “If they’re not volunteers, then what are they doing?” Ben asked.

  “What?”

  Ben restrained himself from reaching across the gearshift and strangling the deputy.

  “If they’re not members of the fire department, then why are those men in the pickups heading to my home?” Ben turned off the county road and onto the drive that led to the Crofts.

  “Well, damn, everyone loves a fire, don’t they?” The deputy rolled down the window, and the air that rushed through smelled of burned wood and left a chemical taste in Ben’s mouth.

  Hudson began to bark in the backseat.

  “Close it, will you?” Ben said. His eyes watered. He craned his head to get a better look out the windshield. He saw part of the house and thick black smoke but couldn’t see any flames. It was hard to see much through the billowing darkness of the smoke.

  “Pull ’er over here,” the deputy said, his hand already on the door handle.

  “I can get closer,” Ben said. They were still a few hundred yards from the house.

 

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