999

by Al Sarrantonio

  The river’s breath caught a bright green scent from the trees, smelling sweet, and the earth and sky were quiet. Freeboard heard the soft rippling sound of her key slipping over the metal serrations of the door lock. She turned, pushed inward and entered the house.

  She was standing in a gracious, vaulted entry hall. Beyond a pair of oak doors that stood open, she beheld a huge Great Room ghostly with furnishings bulging and misshapen under white slipcovers meant to guard them from dust and the beat of the sun. The owner—the heir to the original builder—and his family, a wife and two very young children, had been living in Florence for the past three years, and the house, though available for sale or lease, had during that time remained untenanted. No one would buy it or live there. “Haunted.”

  With a lazy gait, hps puckered judiciously, Freeboard ambled into the room and then stopped with her hands on her hips and looked around. The room’s high ceding was heavily beamed in the crisscross style of an old Spanish mission, and in the middle of a wall a huge firepit yawned. The Realtor moved forward, her boot heels thudding on the random-width planks of a hickory floor as she prowled through the room pulling covers off the furnishings, and when she’d finished she found herself surprised: filled with groupings of overstuffed sofas and chairs that were upholstered in homey and reassuring paisleys, the room was a warm invitation to life that included a game table, stereo equipment, and an eight-foot Steinway, gleaming and inviting, as down upon all, from the high gabled windows, shafted columns of relendessly cheerful sunlight like the fiery blessings of a bothersome saint. So where’s Christopher Lee and the freaking Fangettes? Freeboard glanced to her left and a cozy bar in a fireplaced library bristling with books, and then sauntered past a wide and curving staircase that led up to several bedrooms off a second-floor hall. Then she paused as she noticed that there was an alcove tucked like a secret under the stairs. She walked over and discovered there, lost in shadow, an arched ornamental oaken door that had carved into its center, like an ugly threat, an icily unsettling gargoylish face whose mouth gaped open in a taut and malevolent grin and with eyes bulging wide with rage.

  Freeboard stared back and uttered quietly, “Asshole.”

  She gripped the brass doorknob and attempted to open the door but discovered that she couldn’t. It was locked.

  Ping.

  A faint sound tinged the silence behind her, something like the muted single note of a piano. She turned around slowly and stared at the Steinway, half expecting to see someone sitting at the keys. There were several other wings to the house, she’d been told, including quarters and a separate kitchen for staff. There might have been a caretaker somewhere about. But there was no one there, she saw. She was alone. She walked to the piano and lifted the keyboard cover, and then, leaning over with a grin, began to play “Put on a Happy Face” as she looked all around and then called out loudly, “This is for you, you crazy house!”

  Then she stopped and stared pensively.

  “But what do we do to make someone come and see you?”

  The house did not answer.

  Fine. Be that way.

  She drove back to Manhattan lost in ponder, gave the car to her doorman, rode up to her apartment, let herself in and went straight to her study, where she sat and began to tug off her boots.

  “Evening, Madam.”

  Antonia, the maid, had come in.

  “You are going out for dinner, Missus?”

  “No. I’ll eat at seven.”

  “Very good.”

  “Tell George to fix me a Cajun martini, would you, Tony?”

  “Yes, Missus. Something else?”

  Freeboard finished tugging off a boot, dropped it, and then scrutinized the housekeeper carefully, frowning. “You look tired. You’ve got bags. Are you sleeping okay?”

  “Not so good.”

  “Are you worried about something?”

  “No, Missus.”

  “You sure, Tony?”

  “Yes. I am sure.”

  “I think maybe you’re working too hard.”

  The housekeeper diffidently shrugged and looked away.

  “You and George take the day off tomorrow, Antonia.”

  “Oh, no, Missus!”

  “Yes, Missus. You do what I say. And you know, I don’t feel like much dinner. Just a sandwich. Okay? Just whatever. And would you make that martini a double?”

  “Very good, Missus. Yes. Right away.”

  Dainty in her blue-and-white housemaid’s uniform, the middle-aged housekeeper padded away. Freeboard stared at her back with concern. She finished pulling off the other boot, let it drop to the floor, then stretched her legs out and wriggled her toes.

  My God, does that feel good!

  Staring softly into nothingness, she thought of the mansion again. And then stopped. Yeah, let’s give it a rest. She leaned her head back on the chair and closed her eyes. Then heard the click of the answering machine coming on. The publisher’s wife again, Elle Redmund. “Hello, darling, did you get my other message? Well, never mind; it turns out that our visitor isn’t coming after all. Thanks anyway, Joanie. We’ll see you Friday night.”

  Another click.

  For a time there was silence and shallow breathing. And then suddenly Freeboard’s eyes opened wide as, in one of those mysterious events of the spirit wherein the unconscious broods upon data, draws conclusions, then presents them to the mind as inspiration, she experienced a sudden, overwhelming revelation.

  There it was! That was it! She knew how to sell the house!

  “Your martini, Missus Freeboard.”

  “Thanks, Tony. Tell George it looks perfect.”

  “Yes, Missus.”

  Freeboard took the glass but did not drink. She was plotting.

  Not every epiphany originates in grace.

  Freeboard’s party that Friday was lively and crowded, crammed with playwrights, politicians and corporate executives, models and socialites and Mafiosi, anyone who’d ever bought a property from her. For the space of half an hour the hostess was nowhere to be found, nor was her publisher guest, James Redmund. When Freeboard reappeared among her guests, she seemed pleased.

  Step One of her plan had been completed.

  On the following Thursday, five days later, the renowned British psychic, Anna Trawley, sat by a fire while she sipped at tea in the den of her Cotswold cottage in England when a message arrived from a total stranger, an American Realtor named Joan Freeboard. Her little face a cameo, delicate and pale, Trawley, in her forties, had a quiet beauty and her small and limpid chestnut eyes glowed faintly with some distant but ineffable sadness on which they seemed constantly inward turned. Beside her on a small, square teakwood table waited mail and a fresh-smelling copy of the Times, and on a paneled wall hung a few remembrances: a photo of herself with the Queen; a newspaper headline NOTED PSYCHIC FINDS KILLER; and a photo of a child, a pretty, dimpled young girl who, in the blur of retouching and tinting over the black-and-white photo with pastel colors, seemed lost in some other dimension of time. Beneath an open window lay a plastic Ouija board upon a table with two facing chairs.

  “Mum?”

  Trawley turned to the girl who had entered, her pretty, young maid, newly hired. “Peta?”

  She was holding out a small, round silver tray. Trawley absently stared at a deep white scar tucked into the maid’s right eyebrow for a moment, wondering what painful event it commemorated and whether it had happened by chance; then she lowered her gaze to the offered tray. Upon it, in a square dull yellow envelope, lay a cablegram and a message that, by a path at once straight yet labyrinthine—depending on the viewer, man or God—would bond Trawley’s destiny forever to Joan Freeboard’s.

  “Thank you, Peta.”

  “Yes, mum.”

  The maid quietly walked out. Trawley picked up the envelope, slipped out its contents and saw that the cable ran on for six pages. She read them and then rested the papers in her lap, put her head back on the chair and closed her eyes
. A sudden breeze sprang up from the wooded outdoors that ruffled the white lace curtains of the window, and below them, perhaps pushed by the brief, sharp gust, the coned glass planchette that had rested on the Ouija board slid from the center of the board to the top, and there it rested directly on a word.

  The word was no.

  Chapter Two

  “I’ve been dead for eight months, just in case you hadn’t noticed.” Tall and Byronic, urbane, aristocratic, Terence Dare swabbed his brush at a yellow on the palette and then dabbed at the canvas propped before him in the sunlit, high-ceilinged, pitched-roof studio of his Fire Island home. “Ever since Robert walked out of my life,” he mourned in a rich and cultivated voice. “No, I can’t write a word,” he sighed. “I’ve no heart.”

  “Shit shit shit!” muttered Freeboard. “Shit!”

  Dare wiped a spatter of red from his finger onto the painter’s smock that he wore above a T-shirt and faded black denim jeans and then shifted a hooded blue gaze to the Realtor, who was smoking and pacing back and forth in agitation, the echoing clacks of her spike-heeled shoes on the oaken floor bouncing up to a skylight. She swatted at a haze of grayish smoke in her path.

  “It’s the cover of Vanities, Terry! The cover!”

  “Let me get this straight,” said the world-famous author: “James Redmund repels you, he’s a prig and a bore and is also among that elite corps of rectums who are constantly telling us how much they love a challenge, as if living on a spinning rock hurtling through the void dodging asteroids and comets weren’t challenge enough, not to mention tornadoes, death and disease as well as Vlad the Impaler and earthquakes and war, but you laid him anyway?”

  “I told you, it was business.”

  “Are you shtupping for the Mafia now, my precious, and no longer, as usual, for all of mankind?”

  “Oh, fuck you, Terry.”

  “Darling, thousands have tried; only hundreds have succeeded.”

  Looking chic in her navy Armani suit, the Realtor stopped pacing and coughed into her fist. “Gotta quit,” she resolved, her eyes smarting and teary. She clattered to a table where she stubbed out her cigarette in a large white seashell ashtray. “Look, I told you, they don’t run this kind of stuff. Not normally.”

  “No, not normally,” Dare said inscrutably.

  “He’s the publisher; he does what he wants.”

  She kept crushing and tamping the burnt-out butt.

  “When and where did you commit this unspeakable act?”

  Freeboard flopped down into a chair by a window, crossed her arms and stared sulkily at the author. “Jesus, Terry, you could write it in a week.”

  “When and where?” Dare persisted.

  “At the dinner party Friday. In my bathroom.”

  “In your bathroom?”

  She gave a little shrug.

  “It’s okay. We ran the water real loud.”

  The author appraised her as if he were measuring the distance to a star. In her small green eyes set close together he could find no trace of blush or guile; their expression was just as he had always observed it to be, which was blank and vaguely expectant. It was as if she were eternally awaiting further comment. Her soul is a wide-open window, he reflected; she’s as simple and direct as a shopping cart.

  “You could write the fucking thing in an hour.”

  And more tenacious than the grip of a deep tattoo.

  “Now let’s see if this is right …” Dare started expressionlessly.

  She looked away and rolled her eyes. “You always do this.”

  “You’ve been offered the exclusive listing on Elsewhere,” he reviewed, “but the problem, it would seem, is that it’s haunted and—”

  “It’s no such thing! Nothing’s happened there in years! I mean it’s just that it’s got this shitty-creepy reputation.”

  The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Literature stared numbly.

  “Shitty-creepy?”

  “So okay, I’m not a writer.”

  “You’re a criminal. You’ve lined up Anna Trawley, the world-famous psychic; the renowned Dr. Gabriel Case of NYU, the authority in all such matters, smile-smirk; the four of us then spend a few nights in the house, and while Trawley and Case take baths in the vibes and discover nothing ghostly or unusual whatever, I observe, making copious notes, of course, and then I write a little shitty-witty article about it that thoroughly debunks the idea that it’s haunted; your pipe-smoking bathroom incubus prints it, the house’s reputation is now Caesar’s wife and you sell it and get filthier rich than ever. Does that sum it up fairly, my Angel of the Closings?”

  “I’ve been offered a triple commission on this, Terry. That’s seven fucking figures.”

  “Must we really use the eff word so incessantly?”

  “We must!”

  “Then might we please pronounce it ‘fyook’ or something, precious? I mean, really.”

  Aloofly, he turned and examined the painting, a swirling mélange of varied shades of vivid yellow. Freeboard leaped up from her chair and approached him. “You owe me, Terry!”

  Dare lifted his brush to paint.

  “Now it comes, the deadly rocket attack on my guilt.”

  “You’re denying that you owe me?”

  “Sigmund Freud would have killed for your gifts.”

  She planted herself in front of him and folded her arms across her chest. “You’re denying it?”

  He looked down at his bright red Nike tennis shoes and then shook his head and sighed. “No, I owe you,” he admitted. “I owe you immensely. You’ve always been there for me on the Dawn Patrol, all those endless, awful nights when I needed a shoulder that I knew wasn’t padded with secret envies and lies and spites.” His eye caught a glistening blue on his palette. “You’re steadfast and loyal and completely unexpected, my Joan; you’re the only living human that I trust. Still, I’ll have to disappoint you on this, I’m afraid.”

  “For godssakes, it’s just a magazine article, Terry! You could have a broken heart and still write a freaking article, couldn’t you!”

  He looked up at her with quiet incredulity.

  “I mean, it’s not like a book or something!”

  “No, it’s not like a book,” he said tonelessly.

  “What’s that look for?”

  “What look?”

  “That look.”

  “I am probing for the source of your feral cunning.”

  “Meaning what? What does feral mean?”

  “Anything relating to the national government.”

  Glaring, he turned back to the canvas and painted.

  “Oh, was that some kind of faggoty joke?”

  “As you like it.”

  “Come on, Terry, quit kidding around and do the piece.”

  “I would love to but it’s simply not possible.”

  “Even though this freaking deal means the world to me?”

  “Yes.”

  “And all because of some weight-lifting wannabe model you picked up in the park feeding steroids to the pigeons? I’m not getting this, Terry; I’m not getting this at all.”

  “My dear Joanie, there is more to this matter than Robert,” sighed the author. Freeboard watched him intently, frowning; there was something evasive in his manner and his voice. “In fact, there’s a great deal more,” Dare asserted.

  “Yeah, like what?”

  “Well, just more.”

  “What more? Come on, what? Be specific.”

  “It’s just writing itself.”

  “What about it?”

  “I’ve given it up forever.”

  Freeboard clutched at her forehead and cried out, “Fyook!”

  “It’s too hard, love,” Dare told her, “too many decisions. ‘Had a wonderful day,’ it says in Oscar Wilde’s diary: ‘I inserted a comma, removed it, then decided to reinsert it.’ Joanie, writing is dross.”

  “I’m not believing this, Terry!”

  “It is mental manual labor. As of now, I
consider myself a painter.”

  Freeboard’s frustrated glance darted over to the canvas, swiftly taking in its spiraling yellow meanderings. Her eyes narrowed in dismal surmise.

  “What the hell is this supposed to be, Terry?”

  “Lemons Resting.”

  She reached out and grabbed the brush from his hand, looking worried. “Are you dropping LSD again, Terry?”

  “Oh, don’t be so silly,” Dare sniffed.

  “No more camels in cheap orange taffeta dresses who swear they’re Jehovah’s Witnesses sneaking in the house at night to talk about your books?”

  “You haven’t even a shred of common decency, have you?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “And all of this because I’ve given up writing?”

  “Yeah yeah yeah: first it’s Robert and a broken heart and then writing is a pain in the ass and you’re Picasso. This is sounding like bullshit to me, Terry. Are you scared? You believe in stupid ghosts, for chrissakes?”

  “That’s absurd!”

  Dare’s cheeks glowed pink. He recovered the brush and turned back to his canvas. “Look, the fact of the matter, if you really want to know, is that I simply couldn’t bear to go away and leave the dogs.”

  “Now I know this is bullshit.”

  “It isn’t,” Dare insisted.

  “You’d ruin my life for those two little fucks?”

  Dare turned and glared down at her stonily. “Am I to presume that by ‘those two little fucks’ you are referring to those sweetest, most refined toy poodles, Pompette and Maria-Hidalgo LaBlanche?”

  Freeboard glared back, her face inches from his chest.