A Corpse's Nightmare

by Phillip DePoy

  “Once you’re completely awake,” I told him, returning to my eggs, “how would you like to have a look around the yard?”

  “What for?” He yawned.

  “I don’t know. See if there’s anything in the way of a clue that the legal establishment might have missed.”

  “Oh.” He sipped his espresso. “Okay. I’m in.”

  Test Number Two was passed: I could get out of the house.

  “Good.” I scooped up my eggs, sloshed them into a small bowl. Grabbing a tablespoon from the silverware drawer, I sat at the table beside him.

  “After I finish these,” I told him casually, “I’ll just nip upstairs and see if there’s anything else strange that I didn’t notice before. Aside from the old clock being up there, I mean. Didn’t want to do it while Lucinda was asleep. You’ll be all right down here for a moment or two?”

  “Of course,” he answered, slightly more sprightly. “This espresso is saving my life.”

  “It’s good,” I agreed.

  And Test Number Three asked and answered: I didn’t have to be watched all the time. It appeared that Andrews hadn’t heard a word of Lucinda’s instructions.

  I finished my eggs and regretted them immediately. My stomach instantly rebelled against the unrecognized, invading food I’d given it. I moved slowly, hoping to keep it fairly calm, carefully placing my bowl and spoon in the kitchen sink.

  “Get something to eat if you want,” I told Andrews, pointing to the refrigerator as I left the room. “Girlinda made a lot of food.”

  He didn’t answer.

  The steps were harder to manage than I might have hoped. A bad night’s sleep had affected me adversely. Still, once I was in my room and my heart stopped pounding, I was fairly steady. I took a full five minutes, steadying myself by holding on to the foot of the bed, just surveying the room with a critical eye.

  Everything seemed in order.

  With a dawning awareness, I realized that my bed had been cleaned—the entire room must have been cleaned. I tried not to think of the blood—what the scene must have been like for Lucinda when she’d found me there in December. Or course the room smelled different than I remembered: less dusty; more sanitized. Not just the bed, but the desk, the lamp, the rug, even the pictures had been gone over, wiped off, sprayed with some faintly lemon-scented cleaner. The room didn’t feel freshly cleaned, though it was impossible to determine how long ago it had been tidied. Skidmore could have had the place scrubbed by a service after all the searching for evidence had been done. But he had said that he was continuing his investigations. That left my mind to consider another option: my assailant had done this work himself, in an effort to eliminate evidence.

  Just as that thought was sinking in, I heard heavy footfalls on the stairway.

  “Hey,” Andrews called. “I’m not supposed to leave you alone.”

  He appeared in the doorway with a piece of cornbread in his hand.

  “You’re not?” I asked him innocently.

  “And you’re not meant to go outside, either,” he answered, taking a huge bite of the cornbread, raining crumbs on his shirt and my floor.

  “Unless you’re with me,” I said. “You know you’ll have to clean that up.”

  “What?”

  I pointed to the floor.

  “Oh.” He stooped immediately and began picking crumbs off the floor and popping them into his mouth.

  “You’re eating off the floor.” I shook my head.

  “Have you tasted Girlinda’s cornbread? It’s like you’re eating a fresh ear of corn. If that corn had been planted and tended by buxom angels.”

  “Buxom angels?”

  “Besides,” he went on, standing up again, “these floors are cleaner than my kitchen counters at home.”

  I nodded. “I thought so too.”

  “Who’s been cleaning up while you’ve been away?” He finished the cornbread in one impossible bite.

  “Who indeed.” I brushed past him. “I’m going outside. Do you want to change or will you be wearing your pajamas?”

  “These aren’t pajamas,” he objected, staring down at his dirty shirt and sweatpants.

  “All right.” I sailed down the stairs and headed toward my front door.

  “Wait.” He clambered down after me.

  I shoved the door open and greeted the day. The mud and old leaves on the porch were decorated with yellow pine pollen. It was a porch where nobody had lived for a while.

  “The same person who cleaned my bedroom,” I said, really to myself, “didn’t seem to feel a similar compulsion to tidy up out here.”

  “My room—your guest room’s a little musty too,” Andrews observed, coming through the doorway.

  Past my front steps, the day had turned to gold. The sun was up, the sky was clear, the air was crisp. Spring’s wanton suggestion hid everywhere: trillium under brown leaves, rhododendron buds about to open, mountain laurel yearning to show white cups instead of snow.

  “Looks like winter’s done,” Andrews said softly. “You slept through winter. Like a bear.”

  “It’ll snow tomorrow, or the day after,” I assured him. “Winter looks finished, but a part of its plan is to lull you into a false sense of spring.”

  “Winter is not an anthropomorphic malevolence,” Andrews said, kicking at the leaves on the porch. “It doesn’t mean to be cold. It just is cold. That’s its essential nature.”

  “You invoke Aristotle’s Metaphysics, ‘what belongs to a thing in respect of itself belongs to it in its essence.’”

  “I refer, rather, to Aquinas,” he corrected, “‘essence is itself the very thing that exists.’”

  “Or do you misunderstand Hegel,” I went on, “when he tells us that ‘essence is mere Identity.’”

  “I’ve really missed you.” Andrews was grinning.

  I nodded, avoiding looking at him. “Well, I’m not entirely back yet. Winter’s not gone, and I might slip into hibernation again at any moment. So let’s have a look around the yard while I can still walk.”

  I charged off the porch. Andrews followed.

  “What are we looking for?” he wanted to know.

  “Yes,” I admitted. “I don’t know. But in the same way that it’s curious for my room to be so clean when the rest of the house is as it should be after months of neglect, we may find such anomalies here in the yard.”

  “Except I’d just reckon that Lucinda cleaned up your room because she knew she’d be sleeping there last night.”

  “I don’t think she had time,” I told him, kicking random sticks and stones on the ground, looking for anything out of place. “I’ll ask her, of course, but I don’t know when she would have done it.”

  Andrews sat down on the steps. “Well, she did come to your house before you got here.”

  “Did I tell you that Truevine Deveroe was up here day before yesterday with one of her dogs and saw a man coming out of my house?”

  “What?” he asked, louder than he meant to. “Truevine, the witch girl?”

  “The dog ran off after the man,” I went on, “and Truevine called Skidmore.”

  “Did they—they didn’t find the man?”

  “Not so far,” I said, “but I have the idea that he came here to put the clock up in my room.”

  “Clock?”

  I stopped poking around and looked back at Andrews. “I didn’t mention that to you last night?”

  “The clock on the mantel.” He nodded. “Right. The reason you almost bludgeoned me to death. That clock.”

  “That clock.”

  “Why in God’s name would a man break into your house to put that clock in your room?” He shook his head. “You’re really shot, brain-wise. You know that, right?”

  “I don’t know what I know.”

  “You’re obsessing over this clock, I’ll tell you that.” He locked eyes with me. “And you’re doing it to avoid thinking about something else. I don’t know what, but this is a thing you do: sometim
es you fixate on something innocuous in order to eschew more germane matters. You do this, I believe, because you have a brain that won’t admit that it can’t figure something out. You have a vain brain.”

  “I have a vain brain?”

  “You heard me.” He shrugged. “So we can rummage around in your yard if you want to. We can talk about the clock or the brand of cleaner some mysterious maid used on your bedroom floors. We can even indulge in some operatic version of your own post-coma trauma. Or you can cut out this crap and have a look at whatever it is that’s really important here.”

  “And what would that be?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “But you do, your brain does, your dreams do.”

  “Look, Dr. Freud,” I began.

  “That’s Dr. Jung, boyo,” he corrected.

  “Look, damn it,” I snapped, “I want to spend less time in my subconscious, not more! I’m struggling here, to—you know, to stay awake; stay out of my dreams.”

  “But you said…” he objected.

  “I know I said I wanted to figure out what the dreams were about,” I admitted, hopelessly. “But I want to—I don’t know what I want to do.”

  I heaved myself over to where he was sitting on the steps and collapsed beside him. I surveyed the yard. Old leaves and new growth fought each other; helped each other. The decaying leaves from seasons past were turning into sustenance for the new crop of March’s bounty, but the spring shoots had to struggle upward through those final remnants of last year’s autumnal glory.

  I found a lesson in that observation.

  “You know,” I said slowly, as much to myself as to Andrews, “everything new is born out of everything old.”

  He turned to stare at my profile.

  “Have you been reading those books again, that Buddhist monk, what’s his name?”

  “His name is Thich Nhat Hahn,” I sighed, “and I haven’t read him since I woke up. I’m talking about something a lot more organic and, I guess, genealogical.”

  “Thich Nhat Hahn? That’s fun to say. Thich Nhat Hahn.”

  “Stop it. I’m trying to tell you that I’ve had an insight.”

  “Thich Nhat Hahn.”

  “I’m realizing that my mother was trying to tell me something about my heritage,” I went on, ignoring Andrews as best I could. “Or, rather, trying not to tell me something. Trying to avoid telling me something. Encouraging me not to pursue the matter.”

  “Your mother was trying to tell you not to investigate something?” He nodded. “Under ordinary circumstances, that would be the fastest way to get you to do it.”

  “Exactly,” I agreed. “So did I do it and I just can’t remember it now? Or did something prevent me from doing it, and I just let it go in favor of a thousand other things she told me not to do?”

  “And I care about this because…?”

  “I have to find out about my mother’s family.” I stood up. “This is about her and her family. I’m positive of that.”

  “You think that the man who tried to kill you,” Andrews realized, “did it because of something in your maternal genealogy!”

  “Though why that would be the case I have no idea.” I got to my feet and headed back into the house. “But I actually believe that if you find the motive, you have a better chance of finding the man.”

  “And sometimes the motive is the man.” Andrews stood up.

  I opened my front door. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Good, you’re going back inside,” he said, following me in. “I knew that walking around out here was a bad idea.”

  “No, I’m getting my keys,” I told him. “We’re going to Fit’s Mill.”

  He swallowed the last bit of his cornbread and stopped dead still.

  “We’re not going anywhere of the sort,” he insisted.

  “You can come with me if you want to.” I lumbered through the door, heading up the stairs to collect my keys and wallet. “But if you’re joining me, you should put on some shoes.”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” he repeated, still standing on the porch. “And what is Fit’s Mill?”

  “It is, believe it or not,” I called down to him from the stairs, “the final resting place of my mother’s remains. I think.”

  “You don’t know?”

  I heard the mantel clock—it was ticking on my bedside table. “I can’t even be certain she’s dead.”

  “What?”

  I could hear that Andrews was headed up the stairs. I had every hope that he might soon be changing out of his pajamas.

  “With my parents,” I called out, steering myself into my room and pocketing keys and wallet, “you never can tell. I thought my mother was dead once before, and then I found her quite alive and well. I talked with her in June Cotage’s kitchen, and had the opportunity of telling her good-bye. And, of course, my father always claimed that he couldn’t completely die. Simply refused to. His ghost is still around. So is hers.”

  Everyone in Blue Mountain could still tell stories about my parents and their odd traveling performance group, The Ten Show, though it had been disbanded for nearly fifteen years. Rumors still circulated about my father’s bizarre magic act, and my mother, his lovely assistant. They were quite well-known in the world of professional magicians—a world about which I knew absolutely nothing. My father’s work was often mentioned around town, especially if something odd or unexplained had happened. When a seven-month-old baby had fallen from a second-story window and escaped unharmed, someone told someone else that the child had been caught by the ghost of my father, who had always been interested in protecting innocents. On the other hand, if a young girl in our town got pregnant without benefit of husband or wedding ring, my mother’s name would be invoked—the patron saint of sinners, if such an oxymoron would be allowed in any decent religion: a patron saint of the promiscuous lover, the unfaithful wife.

  I traded my slippers for hiking boots and headed down the stairs. I didn’t turn around when I heard him behind me, but I could tell he’d put on heavier shoes, at least.

  “What do you mean your mother was ‘dead once before’?” he asked.

  “You don’t remember? One of the main reasons, seven or eight years ago, that I first came back to Blue Mountain to live in this house was because both of my parents were dead.”

  “I can barely remember seven or eight days ago.”

  “I thought my mother was dead,” I said as I stepped around him, heading out the front door, “but there she was at June and Hek Cotage’s place: Dolores Devilin, older, no wiser, trying to offer me some kind of favor.”

  “I don’t remember anything about that. And frankly, I’m always a bit uncomfortable whenever I hear you talk about your mother, so—”

  “I’m telling you that if my mother is, in fact, dead, she’s buried at Fit’s Mill.”

  I turned to face him. He had not, in fact, changed clothes. He was still wearing sweatpants and his dirty T-shirt. He had only added chukka boots and a light blue jacket.

  “Well if we’re going,” he announced, “I’m driving, so give me your keys. Now.”

  “You don’t know where it is.” I looked him up and down disapprovingly, and then headed out the door.

  “You’ll guide me,” he insisted, following me, “if you don’t fall asleep too much on the way. Keys!”

  I very deliberately locked my door—an uncharacteristic gesture in my community—before I held up the entire key chain.

  “This is certainly the blind leading the lame,” I mumbled.

  “Amen,” he intoned, grabbing the keys from my hand and heading for my truck.

  14.

  It felt good to be rolling down the road. The day had opened up nicely. The cool air rushed all around us as Andrews drove my big old beat-up green truck through the clean spring morning. The inside of the truck was a comfortable mess, poorly folded maps, half-read paperbacks, and a little straw. I loved my pickup truck. It was as much my ho
me as the kitchen table. We were headed faster than we should have been down the highway and away from Blue Mountain. I directed Andrews toward a trail I knew, a back way that was, I admitted, more footpath than thoroughfare.

  As we turned off the paved road and onto the trail, I allowed myself to be distracted by the beauty of the woods. Light flirted and flashed and darted through new green and old shadows. Nothing in this part of the landscape was entirely free of shade and soot and shadow, but spring light blasted and shook and stemmed in every direction. I was mesmerized by the patterns.

  “Did anyone tell you,” I said hazily, beginning to slip away, “that your bottle of French pastis may have had a hand in saving my life?”

  Andrews responded by swerving the truck in a violent S shape and coming to a halt.

  “What the hell?” I snapped, startled back to complete consciousness.

  “This isn’t a road,” he explained. “Plus: you were drifting.”

  “I was not.”

  “Look.” He slowed the truck. “If you’re not going to be any more aware of your state of mind than that, I’m turning the truck around and the only place you’re going to investigate is your bed.”

  “No.” I sat up. “You’re right. I was drifting. It won’t happen again.”

  “You were drifting.”

  “I was gazing at the dappled—what’s that Hopkins poem, ‘Glory be to God for dappled things’?”

  “‘For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow’” he quoted. “‘For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings’—then something, something.”

  “That’s the one,” I affirmed. “That’s where I was.”

  “Drifting along in a Gerard Manley Hopkins semi-erotic frenzy of alliteration,” he warned, “is still drifting, when all is said and done.”

  “It won’t happen again,” I repeated.

  “We’ll see,” he said. “Now, where do I go? I mean, this isn’t a road.”

  I surveyed the flora ahead, and it appeared as dense and impenetrable as a fortress.