Spirit

by John Inman

  I patted his cheek and gave him a wink, all the while fighting back a sob of my own. “Sure, honey. Daddy’ll be just fine.”

  He turned up his little mouth and gave me a weary smile. “Good,” he said as he snuggled into the pillow and closed his eyes.

  Sam quietly set up the baby monitor on the nightstand by the bed and turned it on.

  I switched off the light, and Sam and I moved to the door. I wasn’t sure, but I thought Timmy was already asleep.

  I was wrong.

  As we closed the bedroom door quietly behind us, Timmy spoke from the slash of moonlight shining through the window onto the bed.

  “Uncle Jason, Uncle Sam?”

  “Yes?” I answered. “What is it, Timmy?”

  “Watch out for the bad man,” he said. “Daddy says he’ll be here soon.”

  What the hell does he mean by that?

  I stared at Sam.

  “He’s half asleep. He doesn’t know what he’s saying,” Sam whispered, clutching my shoulder, his lips to my ear.

  I nodded for Sam’s benefit, but I wasn’t so sure I agreed with him.

  “All right, Timmy,” I said, loud enough for the boy to hear, but not loud enough to wake him if he was beginning to doze off. “We’ll be careful. Now go to sleep.”

  We waited for a handful of heartbeats, and when Timmy didn’t speak another word, I gently pulled the door closed until it clicked. I stepped to an antique secretary standing alone in the hallway, and from the top drawer, I extracted a key. It was a skeleton key that fit every lock in the house. I returned to Sam’s bedroom door and locked it.

  When I was satisfied Timmy was safely locked inside, just like we had been instructed by that wascally goddamn wabbit, I dropped the key in my pocket.

  Afraid to speak, afraid to voice our fears, Sam and I headed back to the basement. I grabbed the baby monitor from my bedroom on the way. No matter what lay ahead, I was determined Timmy would remain safe.

  Nothing else mattered.

  Except the “bad man.” What had Timmy meant by that?

  Who the hell is the bad man?

  I GRABBED the pick and just as quickly set it back down. “Sam, I can’t use the pick here. What if I… hit him?” I shuddered. Only after I spoke the words did I fully admit to myself I believed it all now. I believed everything Sam had believed from the beginning. Paul was still here. He had never left this house.

  Sam shuddered too, considering what I’d said. “We’ll use the shovel, then. And we’ll dig carefully. Okay?”

  I nodded, rubbing the goose bumps from my arms. “Okay.”

  I stared at the ground, my attention snagged by a tiny rill of dirt shifting beside my foot. It was moving by itself. I watched as a tiny avalanche of pebbles and earth buried my toe. What was going on? Why was the ground moving?

  “Feel it?” Sam asked, clutching my arm. “Feel the house trembling?”

  I ducked as beams creaked in the ceiling above our heads. It sounded like the house was gently settling—or quivering in anticipation. From beneath the stairs leading up to the service porch, I heard the hum of the baby monitor where we had plugged it in. Timmy’s room was silent, reassuring me the boy was still safe. The crackly static generated by the monitor, the mindless white sound it cast out across the basement, was like a promise to me that Timmy could come to no harm without my knowing.

  We stood quietly, my hand at the back of Sam’s neck, waiting for the house to stop shuddering around us. Finally, it did. The creaking walls and ceiling once again grew still. Expectant. Only the reassuring hum of the baby monitor was left behind.

  Sam laid the tip of the shovel to the dirt and drove it into the ground with his foot. He grunted as he turned up a spadeful of soil and tossed it a few feet away. He had a relieved expression on his face I fully understood. He hadn’t hit anything.

  “Oh, Jesus, Jason. I don’t know if I’m ready for this.” It was the first time Sam had shown any uncertainty at all. It astounded me to hear it now.

  “Want to call the police?” I asked. “Want to let them take it from here?”

  Sam shook his head. “No. What if we’re wrong?”

  “But we’re not wrong,” I said.

  Sam glowered. “I know.”

  The line of his mouth narrowed in determination. His brow furrowed. He drove the shovel into the ground again, pressing it deep with his foot, once again tossing the upturned soil aside to keep it out of the way.

  Sam hit a hard patch of earth so I moved in with my pick and carefully broke the ground up for him. Then I stepped back and let him go to work with the shovel again.

  As he worked, I saw a tear slide down Sam’s cheek. “That tooth,” he muttered, his voice warped and raw with emotion. “What did Paul go through before… the end?”

  I moved in and wrapped my arms around Sam, bringing his digging to a halt. He melted into me, letting me soak up his heartbreak, glad to be rid of it maybe. Glad to be sharing it. And I did feel it leak into me. But it wasn’t the only misery I felt. My heart was breaking too.

  I stroked Sam’s back and whispered into his ear. We were both trembling with exhaustion and emotion. “I don’t understand what could have brought it all on, Sam. What happened that changed Paul from a doting husband and father to a—to a victim? How did so much evil enter into this house? There was a new baby. A young couple. Lives waiting to be led. And then—what? Murder? Cold-blooded murder? Out of nowhere? What the hell brought it on?”

  Sam could only shake his head, as confused by it all as I was. While we both seemed to have a handle on the reality of what had happened here, we still had no idea of the cause of it all.

  And could Sally really be involved? Could my sister really lift that crowbar and swing it at the man who fathered her child? Smashing his face, breaking his teeth? Killing him? It was impossible to comprehend such a thing. But if she had, could she then turn around and bury the body like so much garbage. Even go to the trouble of hiring masons to construct a wall across her basement, sealing the gravesite away from prying eyes for what she hoped would be forever? Explaining the wall away as an upgrade to the property? Then selling the house, the ground, the grave, the body to her own brother as if nothing had happened here at all? Could Sally do that?

  Could anyone do that? And if Sally did do it, how in God’s name could she live with the guilt? She had loved Paul once. She must have. Could she really take his life and then simply go on with her own, never looking back? Never considering the ramifications of her actions?

  And what about her son? What about Timmy? Could she take such an important piece of his life away and never let him know what a wonderful man his father had been? Even go so far as to cut off the rest of Paul’s family from the boy? Or did she do that to put Paul out of her mind? Was that the only way she could deal with the guilt of what she had done? The fewer reminders that Paul had ever existed at all, the easier it would be?

  Could it really be that simple? That cold and that simple?

  Sam pressed his stubbly cheek to mine. He kissed me, then gently pushed me away.

  “Let’s get back to work. Let’s finish this. I want this night to be over.”

  “All right,” I said and stepped back. “Let me soften the ground for you.”

  He allowed me to stab the earth repeatedly with my heavy pick until I could barely lift it one more time; then he stepped in and took over, once again shoveling the dirt away, tossing it to the side. While he dug, the house remained silent, looming over us like a great bird of prey. Waiting. The baby monitor hummed its silent white song under the stairs. I could picture Timmy sleeping alongside his best friend, his troubles hopefully forgotten. For a while.

  The tooth of his murdered father still clutched in his tiny fist.

  Perhaps an hour later, Sam drove his spade into the pungent earth, and we heard the hollow thump of what sounded like the shovel striking a wooden box.

  The sound startled us so, we froze like statues, staring at the
ground at Sam’s feet. When we reclaimed our senses, I grabbed the pole lamp in the corner and dragged it closer. We looked in the hole Sam had been digging and saw a narrow expanse of leather and wood. It appeared to be the top of a treasure chest. Then I realized what it really was.

  It was an old steamer trunk.

  Sam tapped it with the shovel again. It rang hollow in the ground.

  He scraped the shovel over the top of it, carefully exposing more and more of the trunk as he worked. The leather strips on the top of the trunk appeared rotten. The shovel peeled them off as if they were hardly connected to the wood at all. I saw a buckle. A brass buckle, green and corroded with age and moisture. Then another. The top of the steamer trunk was rounded and fat. I wondered if it had belonged to the old lady who owned the house before Sally. Perhaps it had been in the basement when Sally bought the property from her.

  But what was it doing here, buried in the ground? And how could I be dumb enough to even ask myself that question?

  What the fuck did I think it was doing here buried in the ground?

  “Oh lord, Sam.” My heart was in my throat. I had the horrible sensation of being on the verge of heaving my guts out. That realization made me think, Crime scene. Don’t do it. Don’t puke. For Christ’s sake, don’t puke.

  Oh God.

  “He’s here,” Sam said. His tears were falling once again. He had a stunned expression on his face, as if he had really not believed any of it until this very moment. As if it had been a game. Just a game. “He’s here at our feet, Jason. My brother. Paul. He’s here in front of us.”

  I tried to put a lie to it all. It was the only way I could cope. I had to deny it. All of it.

  “You don’t know that,” I said. “There could be a hundred reasons for this steamer trunk to be buried here.”

  Sam gave me an incredulous look. “Name one.”

  When I didn’t answer, he made a few more scrapings with the tip of the shovel. Then he cast it aside and dropped to his knees. He cleared the rest of the dirt from the top of the trunk with his hands, scraping around the edges with his fingers, seeking for the edge of the lid, trying to find the latch. It was a large trunk. Almost four feet long. Broad and deep. There was a handle on one end, but on the other end the handle was missing, rotted away in the dirt, perhaps.

  “Jason,” Sam breathed, getting my attention. He had found the latch. It was broken. Bent. He rattled it in his fingers and the latch clicked open.

  Sam looked up at me hovering over him. He was trembling. We both were. His face was filthy. Tears had swept clean streaks along his cheeks. His eyes were red.

  “It isn’t locked,” he said. “The latch is broken. The trunk isn’t locked.”

  With trembling hands, he reached out to lift the lid.

  And a voice behind us said, “Well, locked or unlocked, he wasn’t going anywhere, now was he?”

  Chapter 15

  SAM AND I whirled around. I stood so fast after leaning over the steamer trunk that my vision darkened, and I teetered for a moment, almost losing my balance. Sam grabbed me and kept me from toppling over. My hand clenched in Sam’s, we stepped through the ragged doorway, leaving the shadows behind. We squinted against the glare of the fluorescent lights burning over the basement proper and sought the source of the voice.

  Jack’s voice.

  He stood at the base of the stairs leading down from the backyard. He had that same cocky expression on his face I was used to seeing. But there was another element to the expression now. A fiercer element. He looked like a caged lion who has finally grown tired of his restraints and has readied himself to fight back by biting off the keeper’s head. It took me less than a second to realize that this new and ferocious Jack was probably the real thing. The pompous, snide persona I was used to seeing was just a watered down version of what Jack could really become if he set his mind to it.

  Evil, after all, isn’t always evil. It is only evil when it chooses to be.

  It appeared to me as if Jack had finally chosen.

  He eyed Sam up and down, took in the hole in the brick wall behind us, then centered his attention on me. “You just couldn’t leave things well enough alone, could you, Rosemary? You had to snoop and pry and dig around. No pun intended. You also knocked a hole in the wall I built. Do you know how much trouble it was to lay those bricks? As if that isn’t bad enough, we had to cut our vacation short because of you two nosy fucks. Hopped the first flight out of Providence and here we are. Ready to kick some ass.”

  “So you’re the bad man,” I said. “I wondered who Timmy was referring to.”

  Jack sneered. “That little brat. What does he have to do with anything?”

  Sam stepped forward. He was trembling again, but this time it wasn’t from exhaustion. It wasn’t from fear either. It was from rage. “Timmy has everything to do with it. Unless I’m mistaken, that’s his father lying in there dead, stuffed in that steamer trunk like an old memento. His father and my brother. That’s where he died, isn’t it?”

  Jack snarled. “Why do you think I built the wall? Can’t leave forensic evidence—blood stains and stuff—lying around for just anybody to find. Best to cover it up. So I did. And it stayed covered up until you morons came along.”

  Sam’s voice was a cold fury. “So you did kill him. You did kill my brother.”

  Jack’s face twisted into a vicious smile. He merely stared back. First at Sam, then at me. “Actually, no,” he quietly stated.

  “Liar!” Sam spat.

  Sam made a move beside me, and I reached out and clutched his arm, not sure what he was about to do.

  Apparently, Jack wasn’t sure what Sam was capable of either. He pulled a revolver from behind his back and leveled it at Sam’s chest. It was a big revolver. I mean a really big revolver. A .357 Magnum. I knew, because I dated a cop once who liked to play with his guns. Don’t ask.

  Jack seemed to enjoy the way Sam and I stared at the gun in his hand. “Oh, I stopped by the house on the way here in case I needed a little firepower to back me up. Like it?”

  Suddenly, I was as furious as Sam. “How dare you bring that thing into my house! There’s a child here, you stupid fuck!”

  Jack simpered. “Where is he? Upstairs in bed?” Jack pointed the gun at the ceiling. “Now where would that be exactly? This thing will punch a bullet through two floors and a roof and still keep on going. I’d hate for the kid to get in the way of an errant bullet, wouldn’t you?” He lowered the gun back to me this time. “So back off. Both of you. Step back through that hole in the wall you made. I want to see what you’ve done.”

  “No,” I said. The last thing I intended to do was leave myself and Sam at this jerkoff’s mercy behind that brick wall where he had already stashed one body. “Where’s Sally? What have you done with her?”

  At that, Jack barked a cold laugh. “What have I done with her? That’s a good one. I’m afraid you don’t know your sister very well. Who do you think masterminded this whole thing? Who do you think led poor Paul down here into this basement and had him turn away just long enough to—”

  “Shut up,” Sally hissed. And there she was, standing at the top of the other staircase. The one leading into the house. She must have kept a front door key from when she owned the home before.

  Jack clapped his mouth shut, but there was a nasty sneer on his face that frightened me even more than the gun. He looked like a man who didn’t have too many viable options left. And that scared the hell out of me.

  Sally turned to us, ignoring Jack for the moment. She too was staring at the hole in the brick wall behind Sam and me. “I told Jack you wouldn’t be dumb enough to dig around looking for Paul’s body, but I guess I was wrong. I thought when I sold you the house, Jason, I could keep an eye on it. Stop anything happening if you started snooping around. Anything… embarrassing.”

  That was too much for Sam. “Embarrassing!” he screamed. “You murdered my brother! Don’t you understand what you’ve done? You
murdered an innocent man! A good man! The father of your child, for Christ’s sake! What is wrong with you people?”

  Sally slowly descended the stairs as Jack continued to hold the .357 Magnum on us. There was a sad smile on Sally’s face. “In point of fact, Sam, I didn’t kill your brother at all. It was all an accident. You see, I was stupid enough to begin an affair with Jack. We’ve worked together for years, you know. Paul found out about it and confronted us. He called Jack over on the pretense of inviting him to dinner, and he told us everything he knew. Things got out of hand. They fought, Jack and Paul. And while they were fighting, they tumbled down the stairs. It was an accident. A horrible accident. Paul… broke his neck. He died right here at the foot of these stairs. He died in my arms.”

  The house gave a gentle lurch above our heads. Ceiling beams groaned. I saw Sally grab the handrail on the stairs. Neither she nor Jack seemed particularly surprised.

  “I see he’s still here,” she said. “Still jiggling the woodwork, trying to scare us.”

  I couldn’t believe it. “You knew Paul was haunting this house, and you didn’t tell me?”

  Sally really laughed at that. “With everything else I had to keep from you, dear brother, that seemed like a minor consideration, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Sally,” I said, “let me call the police. We can get this straightened out. If Paul’s death was accidental—”

  The next voice we heard stunned us all. It was Timmy speaking through the baby monitor under Sally’s feet. “It’s all a lie. Daddy didn’t fall. They hit him. They hit him with that metal thing you found. The crowbar. They hit him with the crowbar. They hit his face. You saw the tooth. You know it’s true. They killed Daddy on purpose. Daddy didn’t even have time to cry out. They killed Daddy before Daddy even knew what was going to happen.”

  Sally leaned over the handrail and spotted the baby monitor perched on a box below. Then she turned and stared toward the top of the stairs. She looked back to me. “Where is he? I’m taking him home. He’s obviously irrational. Like I warned you, Jason, you’ll never see my son again. I hope you’re satisfied.”