Family Skulls

by Luc Reid

  “I’m getting to that. As I mentioned, Remy Larsh knew exactly who had killed the man, and when he found out that LaPlante had died in jail, he was furious. You have to know that Remy Larsh had a very strong sense of justice—some said too strong a sense of justice—and to his thinking the worst thing that had happened was not that Benning and LaPlante had died, but that no one in the Wall family had stepped forward to get LaPlante out of jail when it would have helped. If they had worried a little more about what was going to happen to LaPlante and a little less about themselves, LaPlante would never have been killed. Of course, Henry Wall might have been killed instead, but that’s not likely, considering the story he had to tell.

  “So Larsh tried to tell the authorities who had really killed Benning, but they weren’t interested, already having a man in custody for it. So he took matters into his own hands, and he came over to the Wall farm one day and said he was cursing them, that he’d keep the curse and his sons would after them, that since the Walls had refused to help John LaPlante, never again would anyone help them or any of their descendents.

  “Well, Henry and his people were upset about it, but mostly people didn’t believe in curses in those days either, and even if the Walls had, the curse didn’t sound so bad to them. But then they lost Alice one winter when she slipped on the ice and hit her head. She froze to death out on the river while people were walking by within shouting distance. The family didn’t find her until she was freshly dead, sprawled on the ice with frost covering her face. Once she was dead, you see, it didn’t count as help if people saw her. And after that, they’ve always taken the curse seriously.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” said Chloe. “How would the children ever even grow up? A baby can’t survive without help.”

  Neddie raised her eyebrows and looked at Seth. This one isn’t so stupid. Seth rolled his eyes.

  “Well, you’re right,” Neddie said. “It’s not a perfect curse, fortunately. It doesn’t come on the children until they’re about seven, and every once in a while something sneaks through it. And you can usually get around it if you make a favor into a kind of trade. And it doesn’t prevent someone from offering you something you don’t particularly need and hadn’t been specifically wanting. But it’s curse enough, as Alice found out.”

  “And you believe in this curse?” Chloe said. “You think that if you need help, no one will give it?”

  “I’m not affected, dear. It’s just the descendents of the Walls and those that marry into the family, everyone in the house apart from me. And yes, I’ve seen evidence enough of it. It’s hard to see, at first. It distracts your attention from the person who needs the help.”

  “So once somebody knows about the curse, they can help, right?”

  A hand bell rang from downstairs: dinner time.

  Neddie’s face fell, and all at once she looked very tired. “Oh no, dear. No, after that it’s much worse. No one helps a Wall, and since I have only one son and he’s married into the family, no one helps a Quitman any more either.”

  She stood up and smoothed her dress against her legs. “Now let’s go and eat some dinner. And tomorrow, Seth Quitman, you are going to find a way to return that bicycle, in broad daylight, and apologize for what you’ve done.”

  Chapter 5

  They always ate dinner buffet style, with the food set out on a narrow table by the refrigerator. This way no one had to ask anyone else to pass anything, which would have been impossible. Seth felt lucky that his parents cooked dinner every night, since that was help. But they had struck a bargain with each other when they were first married, and exchanged payment to seal it, so that they would both help with the cooking and cleaning around the house for each other and the children. Seth’s meals had been bought and paid for before he was born.

  Every time Seth looked up at Chloe during dinner, her eyes met his with a defiant glare. Well, let her eat in his house if she wanted to.

  Kurt spent dinner lecturing Chloe about Baryonyx, his latest favorite dinosaur. Seth bet his parents would have stopped Kurt, but Chloe kept asking questions. Trying to fit into the family, apparently. What did she think she was doing?

  She seemed worried, too—and having met her mother, Seth wasn’t surprised. He had a sneaking suspicion Chloe’s parents wouldn’t like it if they knew she was at his house.

  The minute Grandma Neddie and Grandma Mary started clearing the dessert dishes, Chloe got up to leave.

  “Do you need a ride, dear?” Grandma Neddie said.

  Chloe shook her head. “My bike has a light on it.”

  That and her parents would see someone dropping her off, Seth thought. He followed her to the front door and opened it.

  “I can’t believe you got your grandmother to lie to me,” Chloe said. “I’m going to find out what you were really doing, sooner or later.”

  Seth ignored the comment about Grandma Neddie. “Why are you so bothered by it? Why can’t you just leave well enough alone?”

  Chloe glared at him. “You’re an idiot.” Then she slammed the door and was gone.

  Seth made his way back to the kitchen to do the pots, his usual clean-up chore. His mom handed him a small bag of beans for it, which he pocketed, and went back to loading the dishwasher.

  “Girlfriend?” she said. Her tone was unexpectedly serious.

  “No,” Seth said. He scrubbed the sink for a minute before bringing over the soup pot and attacking it with a copper scrubber.

  “You have to be more careful,” his mom said, not looking up. “She’s not the right one for you.”

  “What?”

  “Did you invite her here?”

  “No!”

  “Headstrong,” his mother said. “You don’t want a headstrong girl.”

  “You always tell me—”

  “You’re different,” she said. “You and I and Kurt have to be strong-minded. But you can’t marry someone who wants to go their own way. You know what our family has to put up with, how hard it is to manage. You have to marry someone who’s strictly devoted to you, not someone who’s going to go off on their own all the time. There’s no room for it in your life. Any more than there is for engineering. Remember that.”

  “Why are you so hung up on me not being an engineer? I could—”

  “What?” she shouted, turning on him. “You could what? Skip the recommendations? Pay for school by waiting tables all night?”

  “Maybe! How do you know I couldn’t?”

  “Who would know better than I know?” She snapped a dishtowel out to fold it so hard that Seth winced. “Do you think I wanted to stay here my whole life? Do you think I didn’t have anything I dreamed about? It’s not about what you want, Seth. It’s about what you can have. You can’t have college. You can’t survive in a world where you can get run over and no one will even wonder where you are until you’re dead. It’s not a matter of choices.”

  Seth had heard the lecture before, but he had never heard his mom wanted to do anything except live in Caledonia and be a housewife. “What were you going to do?” he said.

  “Travel,” she said. “Get a job overseas. I studied like a madwoman, all through high school, three languages: French, Spanish, Italian … I was going to be an au pair to become fluent in French, then get a job doing translations, then do it all over again in Italy and Spain. I had a plane ticket. I took a bus to New York City, right to the airport, and do you know what happened?”

  She didn’t even look at him. She was staring down into the sink, as though the scene were playing out on a screen there. “I missed my plane. I got to the airport in plenty of time, but no one would help me with my luggage and I didn’t know then that you paid people to do that. No one would tell me where the ticket counter was, where the gate was. Then someone stole my purse, and no one paid any attention when I screamed. My ticket was in the purse. I went to the airline to ask them to give me a new ticket or book me on a new flight, but they wouldn’t help me. They couldn’t. I
spent that whole night in the airport and took a bus home the next day with the last of my money. Then I went to your father’s house and I told him I would marry him after all. He’d asked me before and I said no, but that was just pride.”

  Seth was staggered: he’d had no idea. And it explained why his mom was so upset about the engineering—but it still didn’t mean she was right. “Mom, just because it happened to you doesn’t mean it’s going to happen to me.”

  “That’s exactly what it means. You think I didn’t believe the exact same thing you did? That my parents were just afraid, that it was going to be different for me? It happens every generation: it happened with me, it happened with Guy … and it always happens the same way.”

  “What happened to Uncle Guy? Did he try to go somewhere too?

  “The point is that you have to think about your future, and your future is right here, keeping your head down and trying to survive. And if you have children, trying to teach them the same thing before they go out in the world and maybe never make it back.”

  Seth scrubbed in silence. It wasn’t worth having this argument with his mom. Maybe she was right, even. Maybe that was what was driving him to strike back against the Larshes, the sure knowledge that if he didn’t, his future was as narrow and cold as a rail on a railroad track.

  But that’s why he didn’t need to argue: he was going to do something about it. He wasn’t going to rest until the curse was lifted. Not unless the Larshes managed to stop him first.

  “When are you returning that bike?” his mom said, eventually. Her voice was subdued now, as though she regretted the speech she had just given him.

  “I need a ride. I’ll give you a bag of beans to help me bring it back tonight.”

  Seth’s mom filled the detergent cups and shut the dishwasher. “I can’t tonight,” she said, starting the cycle. “I have editing to do; I’ll be tied up for at least the next few days. Ask Grandma Neddie.”

  Seth’s mom did copyediting on the side to supplement his dad’s income from the spring factory. It came in dribs and drabs, but every once in a while she would get something big, and then she’d be tied up day and night until it was done.

  Well, he wasn’t going to ask Grandma Neddie for a ride. And fortunately she couldn’t offer to drive him down and make him return the bike face-to-face, because that would be helping. Seth would have to figure out some other way, maybe biking down and getting a bus back. It grated on him, but given the situation, he wasn’t going to be able to return the bike that night. In a way, though, that was lucky: he had homework to do.

  Seth started his homework as soon as he was done with the pots. He worked mechanically, tackling the math and the science first because it was relaxing to give his mind over to logic for a while after the weird and illogical things he’d seen at the Larshes’ house.

  When he was done with those, Seth was faced with reading for English class and a short essay for American History. These were harder, because without the reliable structure of mathematics or science he always found his mind wandering. More than once he relived looking up at the little girl, or touching the cold capstone, or running across the driveway feeling phantom eyes on his back, or (especially) looking up at the array of skulls. He tried to convince himself they weren’t human skulls, or that they were fakes, but they looked too old and too dirty to be fake, and as much as he would have liked to pretend otherwise he was sure they were human.

  He’d been trying to read a single paragraph in The Scarlet Letter at least four times so far, and he still couldn’t make himself focus on what it was saying. So he gave up and turned his alarm back 45 minutes so he could try to finish it in the morning. The history essay he could write in third period study hall, and while it wouldn’t be typed (he wasn’t much of a typist anyway), Mr. McInenery usually didn’t take more than five points off for that.

  So Seth found himself in bed before 9:00, an hour when usually he’d be watching a movie or working on his latest bridge. And as he lay there, he kept shuffling and reassembling what he had found out that day at the Larshes’, trying to make sense of it, with no success. At 10:30 he was so sick of thinking about it that he gave up and finally made the decision he’d been trying to avoid: he had to go back to the Larsh house. He had more questions now than he’d had before he went, and he certainly didn’t have anything specific he could use against the Larshes. The skulls were something though. What would a man be doing with skulls sitting out in his house? There should be something there Seth could use.

  He still wasn’t confident the Larshes didn’t know he’d been in their house: maybe the girl had told them, or maybe the man who had called down been upstairs had seen him out the window and recognized him.

  Which meant he had to go back as soon as possible, before they could take some action of their own.

  Tomorrow.

  *

  The next day was Friday, and at about the same time in the afternoon as the day before, he found himself nearing the turnoff for the Larshes’ land. He’d studied the Vermont Atlas and Gazetteer more and had found a thin, red, dotted line—probably an old logging road—that seemed to come out on or near the Larsh property. By riding down that, he wouldn’t have to risk being seen approaching the house.

  The turn for the logging road was further down than the one for the dirt road the Larshes used, and Seth slowed down when he noticed the mailbox there at the end of it. Should he stop and look over their mail? But if anyone drove by and saw him opening the mailbox … besides, he doubted there would be a stack of bills for eye of newt and wing of bat, or a copy of Black Magic Weekly. He coasted past the mailbox and began looking out for the logging road.

  If they were home, he’d have to content himself with spying on the house from a distance. If they weren’t, he’d try going inside again … but this time he’d make sure no one was home first.

  The logging road, little more than a grassy track, ended in the overgrown pasture behind the Larshes’ barn. Seth left his bike behind a pile of dry brush just before the logging road reached the pasture. Walking as silently as he could, he picked a dry spot behind some bushes where the woods met the field, from which he had a clear view of the house itself as well as of the driveway in front and of the back yard. The day was windy and the bushes bent back and forth; Seth hoped he’d be hard to see. Clouds shifted in the sky, letting through sunlight for a few moments and then closing up again. The gray light made everything look flat; Seth would have liked a little more sun.

  Behind the house, a yard sloped gently down to a line of sugar maples. A dilapidated sugarhouse, just a shack with a raised section of slats at the peak of the roof to let steam out, huddled among the maples. Near the house stood an aluminum tool shed with the door half open; inside Seth could see a snowblower and a cluster of old shovels. Under the eaves of the house on the side nearest him a motorcycle was parked, half covered with a blue tarp.

  Today both the police car and the Subaru were parked in the driveway, and Seth settled in, hoping they would move. If they came outside, would he be able to get near enough to hear without being seen? Maybe he should have tried to get some of that toy spy equipment, stuff that let you hear from a distance. Well, he’d have to make do.

  He lay there for more than an hour, and nothing moved outside except the bushes, the clouds, and the occasional bird or squirrel.

  Finally Mr. Larsh came out front, in civilian clothes, with a tall, heavyset young man who looked about college age, and they sat on the front porch in wooden chairs for about fifteen minutes, talking and drinking mugs of something—probably coffee, although for all Seth knew it might have been the blood of their victims. Seth could hear them from where he was, but not nearly well enough to make out what they were saying. And he didn’t dare move: they were facing out in his direction.

  A phone rang, and a minute later Mrs. Larsh came out. Mr. Larsh followed her back in, and the young man followed a few minutes later. Then nothing for almost twenty minutes. />
  That was when the little girl came out again, holding tightly onto a collection of plastic dolls, which she brought over to the pink dollhouse. Mrs. Larsh stepped outside for a moment to tell her something, and the girl nodded energetically in response. Once Mrs. Larsh had gone back in, though, the girl put the dolls in a heap by the dollhouse and, watching the door all the time, quietly hurried off the porch and into the yard. Then she turned in Seth’s direction and marched toward him. For a moment Seth thought she had somehow seen him, but he watched her face and figured it out a moment later: she wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at that old, tottering barn.

  There’s something about a building that’s still standing that makes it tempting to believe it’s perfectly safe. After all, if it holds up those walls and that roof, certainly it can hold one human being along with them? But Seth had spent enough of his time playing in old barns to realize that you could never count on them. Floors rotted through, holes gaped where you didn’t expect them, things fell down that had been nailed up eighty years before. Nothing had ever happened to him, but he had a friend in grade school who broke his collarbone playing on top of an rotted spring house one summer when the roof broke through, and that wasn’t the only time he’d heard of that kind of thing happening.

  He was willing to bet money Mrs. Larsh had just told the girl to stay away from the barn.

  She opened a side door and disappeared into the dusty darkness. Seth kept to the trees and crept toward the barn, listening. It seemed unlikely that there would be anything valuable to learn from a little girl, but it was his best chance that day, and he wasn’t going to waste it. In science, you didn’t ignore a line of inquiry just because you didn’t expect it to return results: you had to try it and actually find out.

  As it turned out, he wasn’t able to tell much about what the girl was doing from where he was hiding. He heard fragments of her monologue as she played, her voice drifting down from a hayloft or some such place, but as far as he could tell she was just singing a nonsense song, and he couldn’t see her at all. He had nearly decided to creep back to his original vantage when he heard a crack like thunder, a rumbling crash, and then screaming.