No Doors, No Windows

by Joe Schreiber

  Scott stuck H. G. Mast’s newspaper obituary in his back pocket. “There’s so much material here, it’s hard to know where to begin.”

  “My Aunt Pauline might be able to help,” Colette said. “She’s the local authority on scandals and town legends. She knows where all the bodies are buried.”

  “Where is she?”

  Colette nodded back at the main house. “She lives upstairs. Come on inside.”

  He and Henry followed her up a winding path of slick flagstones, through a pair of glass doors that led directly into the formal living room. The furniture was perfectly arranged, the oyster gray carpet swept in seamless unerring waves. It was as humid as a greenhouse inside, so sweltering and queasy-sweet with conflicting smells of imported southern flowers that Scott almost expected to see bumblebees wafting through the air from petal to petal. Beneath that smell hung an even more artificial sweetness, more syrup than sugar. Colette stopped at the bar and picked up a nearly empty pitcher of something red and sticky-looking, pouring a glass tumbler full. “Drink?” A lime fell into the glass, splashing droplets across the backs of her hands. “I’m having rum punch,” she said, slurring her words now.

  “No thanks.”

  “Something else, then?” She whisked a tall bottle of vodka from one of the shelves, poured two fingers, and clinked in ice, thrusting it at him. Scott took the glass to keep it from spilling. “Follow me.”

  They twisted around the corner to a spiral staircase that he remembered from his one visit here, the way it looped in showy circles as it ascended through volumes of open, pollen-thickened air. Colette clung to the railing like a brown recluse spider, leading them to the landing, down another corridor to a closed door. She tapped on it briskly, waited, tapped again. “Aunt Pauline? It’s Lettie. I brought visitors.”

  No sound came from inside. Scott watched as Colette turned the knob and opened the door. The bedroom was huge, dominated by an elaborate four-poster canopy bed where a tiny old woman in a diaphanous white gown lay propped on a mound of pillows, her eyes sparkling with a kind of brightness that might have been dementia. An old-fashioned wheelchair sat next to the bed. Heavy curtains blocked the remaining daylight, and from somewhere, big band music played—Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Glenn Miller, or Count Basie’s orchestra playing “One O’Clock Jump.” The walls were decorated with framed theatrical memorabilia—playbills, publicity photos, programs and newspaper clippings, reviews and advertisements. Setting down his drink to take a closer look at one of the old photographs, Scott decided that at least some of the pictures had to be of Pauline when she was much younger, when she had resembled a slightly less angular Barbara Stanwyck.

  “Aunt Pauline, I want you to meet a friend of mine, Scott Mast, and his nephew.”

  The doll-sized woman sat up to light a cigarette with a gold lighter that looked as big as a grenade. Coughing, waving away smoke with a miniature hand, she favored Scott with a crooked but genuine-looking smile that faded only slightly when she got a good look at his face. “I know you, don’t I?”

  “My family’s been here in town for a long time.”

  “No,” she said, “you personally. You were here in this house before … I remember, you brought Colette’s prom dress.” She tapped a bent finger against her temple and gave him a sly, narrow, not entirely pleasant look. “I don’t forget things like that.”

  Snorting, Colette tipped back her glass so that a thin runnel of pink liquid trickled up one cheek. “Scott’s doing some research on local history.”

  “Oh?”

  “Someone named Rosemary Carver.”

  Inside the cloud of smoke, a light flickered in Aunt Pauline’s eyes. “Oh,” she said. “That poor little dead girl.”

  “YOU’VE HEARD OF HER?” Scott asked.

  “Every town has its ghosts,” Pauline said, not bothering to look around at her great-niece. “Rosemary … well, I like to think she was just an angel, a little one called up to heaven before her time.”

  “What happened?”

  Pauline didn’t answer right away; she puffed luxuriously on the remains of her cigarette, allowing the cloud to thicken around her head. “She disappeared.”

  “Was she from around here?”

  “From one of the outlying areas, I believe, yes.”

  “How old was she when it happened?”

  “Twelve or so, I believe. Thirteen at the oldest—still an innocent. Little lambs so often go astray. Don’t you find that’s true, Colette?”

  Colette sniggered. “Yes, Auntie.”

  “What about her parents?” Scott asked.

  “Her mother died in childbirth. And her father—Robert, his name was—he was a schoolmaster. Not a pleasant man, by all accounts.”

  “How so?”

  From inside the cloud of smoke, a sigh. “His temper was legendary. His students were all terrified of him. There was one boy in his class named Myron Tonkin, a soldier’s son, a real hell-raiser, they say. Myron’s favorite trick was sneaking out to the outhouse to watch the girls when they went to pee. And then one day Mr. Carver caught him staring in at his own daughter. But the boy wasn’t just staring, if you get my meaning.”

  “What happened?” Scott felt himself preparing for the worst. “Did Carver beat the boy?”

  “Oh no.” Aunt Pauline shook her head. “He just spoke to him.”

  “What?”

  “For about five minutes. To this day, no one is quite sure what the schoolteacher said. But they say when the boy came back into the classroom, he was completely pale. He stood there staring at nothing, trembling, his hands stretched out in front of him. At first, people thought he was just pretending, staring at nothing, bumping into walls and furniture, then they realized it was real—the boy had gone blind.”

  “Did anyone ever question Mr. Carver about it?”

  “Of course not,” Pauline said, tongue probing the corner of her cheek. “The only thing he said about it was that the boy had finally cured a bad habit. In certain circles, there were rumors and allegations about how Mr. Carver had … done something to him, but no formal accusations were ever made. Over the next few years, there were other, less dramatic occurrences—one little girl, an incurable gossip, developed a sudden, debilitating stutter. Another boy, a bully who liked to torture animals, was trampled to death by his father’s horse. They were all troublemakers of some sort, all repaid in kind.”

  She paused, looking around the bedroom, and Scott realized that the music had stopped playing long ago.

  “In any event, Carver stopped teaching when his own daughter disappeared. A few people whispered that he had it coming, after what he did to the Tonkin boy.”

  “You mean, was supposed to have done,” Scott said.

  “Mr. Mast, I trust you’ve been schooled on the etiquette of correcting your elders.” Her voice betrayed no change in tone. “Whatever the case, Robert Carver threatened to do much worse to the person who had abducted his daughter.”

  “Why would anyone want to hurt his little girl?” Scott asked.

  “Why does anyone hurt anyone?” the old woman shrugged. “The blood cries out for it.”

  Scott found this statement chilling, like a biblical proclamation gone profoundly wrong.

  “Did he ever find her?”

  “On the contrary,” she said. “He disappeared immediately afterward. No one saw either of them ever again.”

  “ISN’T AUNTIE A HOOT?” Colette asked.

  She walked Scott and Henry downstairs, clinging to the railing so tenuously now that Scott braced himself to catch her if she fell. On the first floor, the ripe sweetness of flowers hit him again, overwhelming and sickly. He knew he would smell it in his clothes when he got home, and it bothered him more than Aunt Pauline’s cigarette smoke.

  “I don’t see how she could know all of that,” he said, “since it happened so long ago.”

  “Are you kidding? Auntie knows everything. The ancestors of these people still live around town
and they all spin their yarns. That one little boy, Myron Tonkin? His great-great-granddaughter Anne works over at the hospital. When Auntie broke her hip last year, those two spent hours hobnobbing together, swapping spook stories—they were inseparable.”

  At the bottom of the stairs, Colette made a hard left to the bar, where the bottle of vodka was waiting for her. She poured a glass without so much as looking at it. “What happened to your drink?”

  “I must have left it upstairs,” Scott said.

  “You sure you don’t want to stay for dinner?”

  He glanced out the window. It was already dark enough to count the first stars. Down below, where the circle drive curved around, he heard an engine growl, and a pickup truck came barging into the driveway with a squeak of brakes. Scott heard country music cranked to speaker-distorting levels, the thudding and squealing of guitars and drums and bass. It stopped and a man climbed out. He had a flat, blandly handsome face and wore an expensive topcoat perfectly tailored to fit his broad shoulders, striding forward with the exaggerated swagger of one who imagines whole universes trembling in his wake. Scott realized he’d just gotten his first glance at Red Fontana.

  “We should get going,” he said.

  Colette smiled. “Don’t worry about Red,” she said. “He’s just going to go upstairs and change and then go out to the bar to drape himself over Sonia Graham all night. Then he’ll come home at two A.M. and try to screw me—that’s always good for a laugh.” She lowered her voice to a stage whisper of mock confidentiality. “There’s a special thing he likes. He likes it when I just lay there and let him do whatever he wants.”

  “Stop it.” Scott covered Henry’s ears with his hands. “That’s enough.”

  Colette wobbled down in front of Henry, lifted his chin, and inspected his eyes as if searching their depths for some hint of comprehension. The boy gazed back at her, expressionless as ever. Scott tried to imagine what her breath must have smelled like in his face at that distance. Finally she touched his nose with the tip of her finger. “If you could have any wish,” she asked, “what would it be?”

  “I wish I was a ghost,” Henry said.

  Colette laughed, bent down, and whispered something in his ear. She stood up and looked at Scott. “You know, it’s a shame things never worked out between you and Sonia.”

  “Thanks for your help.”

  Once they got into the car, he asked Henry, “What did she say to you?”

  “She said I already was a ghost.”

  Through the darkness, Scott looked up at the wide bedroom window and saw a face peering down from between the curtains. It was the old aunt. She had worked herself into the wheelchair and sat, watching them from inside the scented house. The smoke around her head had cleared. She wasn’t smiling anymore. He felt the now familiar tingling in the back of his skull, a moth floating dangerously close to the bug zapper, and braced for the shock.

  ON THE WAY HOME, they stopped for a fried fish dinner at Captain Charlie’s. The counterman had a tattoo of a lizard on the side of his neck. He sat behind the register reading his newspaper, and Scott and Henry carried their cardboard baskets of fried perch and hush puppies over to a booth on the far side of the restaurant. It was decorated in fishing nets and plastic crabs, and they sat underneath a framed picture of one of the owners standing next to John Travolta for a movie that Travolta had filmed here some years ago. The movie showed up occasionally on cable, and Scott realized now how strenuously he had endeavored to avoid it, streets and storefronts of his hometown shown from strange Hollywood angles.

  Afterward, Scott drove to his father’s house and walked Henry to the door. The boy seemed reluctant to go inside.

  “I’ll see you later,” Scott said.

  The boy looked hopeful. “Later tonight?”

  “Probably not. It’s getting late.”

  “What’s your hurry?” Owen’s voice demanded, from somewhere inside. A football game was playing on TV.

  “I’ve got work to do back at the house.”

  Owen gave a mocking laugh. “Work, huh?”

  Scott walked into the living room. His brother was stationed in front of the television rummaging through a bag of potato chips the size of a pillowcase. Bottles and trash surrounded him like the swath of a tropical storm. A battered old guitar leaned against the fireplace, a reminder of the years Owen had spent locked in his room, brooding over the same three chords.

  “What were you looking for in the shed last night?” Scott asked.

  Owen’s shoulders went rigid and he withdrew his hand from the bag. A bloody piece of paper towel hung from his palm like a tattered flag, held in place by strips of Scotch tape with salted yellow crumbs stuck to them. Without looking at Henry, he said, “Go up to your bedroom.”

  When the boy went upstairs, Owen turned and faced Scott squarely.

  “How much longer are you planning on sticking around?”

  “I haven’t thought about it,” Scott said.

  “Yeah, well.” Owen peeled back the paper towel, sucked some of the salt from his wounded hand, never looking away from Scott. “Maybe it’s time you start.”

  “You still haven’t told me why you were out in the shed.”

  Owen looked down, found his beer on the floor, and drained it. “If Dad left anything else around here, I’m entitled to my share.”

  “So you were looking for money?”

  “I’m not going to spend my life dragging wheelbarrows and hauling scrap.” Owen’s face was reddening as he spoke, spitting the words as much as speaking them, and Scott glanced at the empty bottle in his fist, wondered if it might shatter. As genuine as his brother’s anger appeared, he somehow felt as if he wasn’t getting the whole story from Owen—as if perhaps Owen himself didn’t know what he’d been doing out there. He’s scared, Scott realized. I’ve asked him to explain something about himself that even he doesn’t understand, and it’s making him feel like a cornered animal.

  Owen took a deep breath and put the bottle down on the end table to his right. “You remember that time in fifth grade, that kid Brad Schomer who kept messing with you? One time he pushed you from one side of the cafeteria to the other, waiting for you to fight back.”

  Scott felt the tips of his ears growing hot. “Yeah.”

  “You finally broke down and started bawling.”

  “Until you stepped up and hit him for me,” Scott said. “I’ve never forgotten that.”

  “I always wondered why you never stood up for yourself. But now I get it. In this life, you either fight or run away. You’ve always been a runner.”

  Scott glanced at the scrap of paper towel flapping from Owen’s hand. “Take care of that cut,” he said. “And let Henry know I said good night.”

  He could feel Owen’s eyes on him until he got back into his car.

  SCOTT DROVE OUT OF TOWN with a sense of renewed urgency, a stopwatch twitching in the pit of his stomach, a sense of time running out. Seeing Colette and her ancient aunt had reminded him that everything had a deadline, the present bulldozing forward into the future, carrying all the weight of the world with it. Colette had once been so fetching, the sort of girl whose face and body were enough to make you believe in God’s almighty grace, impervious to the ravages of time. All that was gone now, spoiled and sodden.

  And Owen—had Owen ever really had a chance? A permanent storm cloud of doom hung over his brother, portending endless disappointment, from as far back as Scott could remember.

  What about you? What have you got?

  As if in answer, he reached for the front door and turned the knob, stepping inside. The cold within the house slipped around him, insinuating its way through the protective layer of his clothes, finding his core. Scott turned on the lights and stared slowly down the hall, half expecting to see someone—or something—waiting for him here. Time was moving here too, but the stopwatch feeling was gone, replaced by the steady and somehow more apt image of sand through an hourglass. Scott could a
lmost feel it trickling away. He thought of something a writing professor had once said: We write as a means of stopping time; paradoxically this allows us to see how things change. Arrows on a chalkboard, diagrams, equations—action and reaction, cause and effect.

  He mounted the stairs, unconsciously counting them, and stopped at the landing, then turned and went back down again, up the hallway and around the corner.

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, he was sitting back in the dining room with the laptop on his knees. It was 8:02. He had returned expecting nothing more than another marathon of head-pounding frustration and even now stared at the blank screen and the blinking cursor.

  8:07.

  8:13.

  8:22.

  Creative visualization: He’d used it to write greeting cards—why not fiction? Shutting his eyes, he imagined the room around him, the way Faircloth had it arranged on page 138 of the manuscript. The Luger sat on the table next to the open bottle of I. W. Harper bourbon, half full, although a man like Faircloth would see it as half empty. A pack of Lucky Strikes and a red and white box of kitchen matches. And Round House itself, the huge old manse and all its endless subconscious curves and eased edges warping around him in the night.

  I’m Faircloth. I’m Faircloth. And I’m waiting …

  But the last page kept intruding on the rest of the story. Next to the pistol and the whiskey and the cigarettes, Scott began to imagine a stack of old papers, research material, notes, all of it pertaining to a young girl named Rosemary Carver. Old articles. Transcribed court documents. Eyewitness reports of the girl who had disappeared, Milburn’s little lost lamb. What had Aunt Pauline called her?

  An angel, a little one called up to heaven before her time.

  Scott’s eyes opened. He glanced down at the computer screen and knew what he needed to write next. There was no sense of realization—the words were just there, almost as if his father were standing beside him, whispering in his ear. Without hesitation, he started typing.

  Faircloth looked across the table at the articles he had assembled there. Maureen would be home soon, drunk and stinking of another man’s cologne, and she would start yelling at him for making a mess in the dining room, but suddenly he didn’t care about any of it. He didn’t care about his pig of a wife and the way she cheated on him right under his nose, and the pathetic, impotent weakness that he felt when he pretended it wasn’t happening. The only thing that mattered was Round House and the girl, an angel called up to heaven before her time, sad and lost and alone, who had died somewhere under circumstances so horrible that he could only guess what might have happened to her.