Skip pulled a casserole out of the oven, baked in a broad pottery dish. Foxy refilled my un-julep to the top.
“Did you make the dishes?” I asked, as Skip slapped out generous spoonfuls into bowls.
“He did indeed,” said Foxy proudly. “He sells ’em for a small fortune at a gallery in town, but we get to eat off ’em every day.” Skip ducked his head, looking embarrassed.
The casserole was a fine example of what can be done with cans of cream of mushroom soup. It still beat ramen. We ate in silence, except for the radio and the sounds of silverware clinking against stoneware.
Foxy put a scoop into a bowl and set it on the floor for Bongo, who slurped it up with great enthusiasm. (I must take steps to ensure that my vet never reads this.)
Tomas had seconds and then gathered up the bowls. “You doing okay over there?” he asked. “Nothing bothering you?”
“All kinds of things are bothering me,” I said, compelled to honesty by the alcohol. “I was up the bald hill behind the house.…”
They looked at me. I waited for someone to say, “Oh, yeah, that was just Moonshine Hill.…”
“A hill?” said Skip. “No real hills around here.”
Tomas came to my defense, probably out of chivalry. “There’s some rises back there. If you’re walking, it sure seems like you’re climbing.”
This was what I’d feared, but I plowed ahead anyway. “No, it was a real hill. You know, the one covered with all the carved stones?”
The table went suddenly silent, except for the blare of the radio. It was playing “Lydia the Tattooed Lady.”
If you are ever planning on having a serious conversation with people you barely know, about weird carvings on an impossible hill behind your house, try to get a better soundtrack.
Foxy looked at me solemnly across the table. “You seen those stones?” she said.
“Uh,” I said. “Yeah? I mean, there’s a hill and a whole bunch of them on top.”
“That’s not a good place, man,” said Tomas. “My grandma, she’d say there were devils up there.”
“Huh!” said Foxy. “Don’t know about devils.”
I noted that we had somehow skipped completely over the question of whether the hill existed. This did not make me feel better.
The radio informed us that we could learn a lot from Lydia.
“They were just carvings,” I said, even though they hadn’t been just carvings. But if I admitted they were more than that, I’d be opening a door to a whole lot of things. I wanted that door to stay firmly closed.
“Mostly,” said Foxy. “Mostly they are. Sometimes they ain’t. Like the hill. Sometimes it’s there; sometimes it ain’t.”
“Who made them?” I asked, shoving the question of disappearing hills behind that mental door, with the rest.
Lydia, we were told, could show you the world on various parts of her anatomy.
Foxy turned her head and said, “Shut that damned thing off, will you?”
Skip leaned back in his chair and flipped off the radio. I was more relieved than I could say.
“Don’t know,” said Foxy. “Not sure anybody made them.”
“Somebody had to make them,” I said.
“Maybe they grew,” said Foxy. “Ever think of that, eh?” She slammed back the rest of her un-julep.
This was a very unpleasant thought. “Couldn’t it have been… I don’t know… Indians or something?”
Foxy snorted. “There were people here for a thousand years before white men landed,” she said, “but I doubt any of them were ever fool enough to make things like that.”
She glanced at Skip. “Don’t look at me,” he said. “My people were all Chemawa. Whole other side of the continent, like sensible folk. If you want a wise old Indian to dispense sacred wisdom, go find somebody from around here. Me, I throw pots.”
“I’d stay away from them,” said Tomas, who had been listening silently the whole time. “You leave stuff like that alone, it leaves you alone. Mostly.”
I wondered what counted as “leaving stuff alone.” Not wandering around in fields singing to myself? Not making faces at the rocks?
No, that was just nerves. Nothing really happened. You’re suggestible because the whole thing was freaky, that’s all.
I licked my lips. They stung a little from the bourbon. “Did any of you know Cotgrave? My—ah—stepgrandfather?”
“Before my time,” said Tomas.
“I did,” said Skip, surprising me. “Decent old man. Used to ramble around the woods a bit. Rambled a bit in his head, too, I think.” He sighed. “Felt bad for him, being married to—well, I shouldn’t say, on account of her being your grandmother—”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said, taking a hard swig and nearly choking. Foxy pounded me enthusiastically on the back. “I—urk—know what she was like. It’s fine.”
“Cotgrave wasn’t bad,” said Skip. “Mostly I think he just wasn’t there most of the time.” He tapped his forehead.
“Probably the best way to get through being married to my grandmother,” I said. “Did he—ah—did he ever say anything about a man named Ambrose? Or…?”
I wanted to say the twisted ones, but I couldn’t. Not that something was stopping me, but the phrase sounded suddenly stupid in my head, like a cheap slasher film. Oooh, the twisted ones! Scary! All we needed was a bleached blonde co-ed to scream convincingly.
Skip thought for a moment. “Ambrose… Sorry, no. He might have, but it was so long ago now. And I didn’t know him well. He just would come by the studio sometimes on his walks. Helped me with a kiln opening a time or two.”
“Ah, well,” I said. “Worth a try.”
“Don’t go spooking yourself,” Foxy suggested. “You’re already in that house with all that crap. No sense making it worse.”
“Thanks,” I said dryly. “I’ve been trying to forget.”
She grinned and topped up my bourbon. “Here. This’ll help.”
* * *
It is extremely difficult to find a book in a hoarder’s house.
No, let me qualify that. It is extremely difficult to find a specific book.
I spent most of the next day yanking drawers open, searching for the Green Book—or Cotgrave’s manuscript, I wasn’t picky—tearing through boxes, even looking under the couch cushions. I accomplished nothing, except to trash the newly cleaned living room, and eventually gave up in defeat and admitted that this was not the way to find anything.
“Systematic,” I told Bongo gloomily. “I have to be systematic. She could have put it anywhere.”
Bongo opened one eye, decided that this did not sound like food, and closed it again.
Anywhere. Upstairs or on the blocked-up porch or even in a garbage bag I’d thrown out before I knew what I was looking for. Crammed under a dead baby doll or in the box of something As Seen On TV. And she was trying to hide it, which made it ten times worse.
Cotgrave’s typed manuscript should be easier, shouldn’t it? In theory? He wasn’t a hoarder.
Assuming she didn’t throw it out after he died…
I straightened up the living room, feeling discouraged, took Bongo out, and went to bed.
I dreamed that night about the white stone.
People in books always have such wonderfully clear dreams that show you their secret fears or reveal some key element of their tormented past or whatever. But in reality, if you try to explain a dream, you end up saying, “I was talking to Abraham Lincoln, but he was also sort of my father, and we were in the house I grew up in but the window screen kept falling out and I was trying to wedge it back in, over and over again, and I was getting really frustrated and also I wasn’t wearing pants.”
Well. In my dream, I was talking to Cotgrave, who was also sort of my father, and I was looking for someone, except that I kept digging through the boxes in the doll room trying to find them. We were in my first apartment, but the doll room was in it. I was getting very annoyed because Co
tgrave wouldn’t help me find whoever I was looking for.
Then the dream changed and I went into another room—the living room of my first apartment, with the popcorn ceiling and the bong-water-colored carpet—and the white stone was standing in the middle of the room. I was enormously relieved because that’s who I had been looking for all along.
In the dream, I saw the carvings and understood what they were supposed to be.
I went up to the stone and pressed myself against it, wrapping my legs around it, trying to touch the stone as much as I could, cheek and breast and belly and thigh, and the stone was cold and no matter how closely I held it, I couldn’t warm it at all.
Then something woke me up and I rolled over and discovered I’d kicked most of the blankets over Bongo. He was snoring. I hauled the blankets back over myself and went back to sleep and the dreams after that were all the usual foolishness about not being able to remember what period I had math class in.
Maybe if I’d had a terrifying nightmare about the stone, things might have gone differently and I wouldn’t have stayed. Maybe I would have thrown on my clothes, told my father to have the house demolished, and driven away. But I don’t know. I think by then, probably, I was already in too far.
I woke one more time that night, when Bongo launched himself off the bed at the window, baying like a lunatic.
“Gaaaah! Ack! What?!”
He smacked his nose against the window, rebounded, and the bay turned into a yelp, then back to a bay again. Bongo, as I believe I have mentioned, is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
It was deer again. Skip had said they were everywhere out here, and here was proof. Long-legged shapes bounded across the driveway into the trees.
“Dammit, dog, you’re a coonhound, not a deerhound.…”
Bongo scrabbled at the window, indicating his willingness to branch out.
I put my chin on top of his skull and looked out the window. His ears were pricked up as far as they could go (not very far, given the floppiness) and made two soft bumps on either side of my jaw.
Two more deer went by, and then the last of them. There was something wrong with this one’s front legs. It was not exactly limping, but it held itself wrong. For a moment I thought I was looking at a person running stooped over with their arms dangling in front.
I jerked back, startled. The deer crossed the moonlit gravel drive. No, it was only a deer. It had the long neck and the tapered head. There was just something wrong with its front legs, or perhaps its back, that made it shuffle along.
It vanished into the trees. Bongo said “Hrrrwowooo-ufff!” and dropped down, sulking that I wouldn’t let him eat the deer. I sighed.
I felt bad for the deer, whatever was wrong with it. I suppose I could call a wildlife rehabber or something, tell them there was an injured deer in the woods—for all the good that would do. It’s not like I had it in my truck, ready to deliver. Anyway, if a deer was an adult and walking, I’d read that it was more stressful to be captured and treated then just to wander around with a broken leg.
Assuming it was a leg. It had actually looked more like a back problem. Were there hunchbacked deer?
Well, there was that dolphin at the one zoo that had scoliosis and was bent sideways.… Maybe it happens to deer, too.
I mean, you’d think wolves would eat it, but there hasn’t been a wolf around here in a hundred years. Two hundred.
Anyway, I had enough on my plate without taking on the woes of damaged deer. Dreaming about the carved stones… oof.
I’d taken a photo of one, hadn’t I? The phone had made the camera noise before it shut off. I turned my phone on, noted that despite more than a day on the charger, it was at 15 percent battery and sinking fast, and checked the photos.
The last one in the roll was washed out, a gray shape on a white background, badly distorted. The lines looked less like carvings and more like a badly filtered fingerprint. I sighed and turned the phone back off. It had dropped to 9 percent while I was squinting at it.
Bongo climbed onto the bed, grumbling in the back of his throat.
“Go back to sleep, nitwit.” I shoved my feet beneath him.
If I dreamed at all after that, I don’t remember it.
7
“Dad?” I asked.
“Yes?”
“What did Cotgrave die of?”
For a minute I thought he wouldn’t answer, and then he let out a long, whistling sigh. “Oh, jeez, Mouse. That was a long time ago. It was exposure.”
“Exposure?” Whatever answer I’d been expecting, it wasn’t that.
“Well, his mind was wandering quite a bit, and my mother wasn’t the best person to take care of someone like that.…”
We both made noises that might, under other circumstances, have been laughter. My stepmother always says that she can tell we’re related because we have the same laugh. I suppose that means that we have the same not-a-laugh-but-otherwise-we’d-cry sound, too.
It had been five days since I’d started the cleaning project. Two since I’d been up on the hill with the stones. Dad had called, as he’d promised, to check up on me. I’d been tackling a hall closet. It wasn’t a bad one, by which I mean that nothing fell on me when I opened it. Mostly it was old coats and cheap windbreakers. The plastic had gone stiff and cracked around the hoods. No Green Book.
“There was some talk about putting him in a facility,” said Dad. “He’d seemed to be interested in the idea—probably to get away from her, honestly—but then he changed his mind very suddenly. And of course Mother was dead set against a caregiver in the house.” He sighed again. “And then one afternoon he just wandered off, and she called the police the next morning. I’m afraid it took a couple days to find him. Turned out he was in the woods behind the house. Hypothermia. It wasn’t that cold, but he wasn’t in good health.”
“That’s awful,” I said, imagining Cotgrave lying at the base of a tree somewhere. Had he scraped “Kilroy Was Here” into the bark in his last moments?
Jesus, what a morbid thought. Get yourself together, Mouse!
“I think it happens more often than we think. Anyway, I’ve heard it’s not a bad way to go, really. And at least he was out of it.”
He didn’t have to clarify what “out of it” meant. I was standing inside it as we spoke.
Some instinct prompted me to ask, “Was he… uh…? Was his body…?”
“Oh hell, Mouse.” I immediately felt guilty for asking. It was morbid curiosity, nothing more. Had to be. “No,” Dad continued. “No, he’d been outside too long. Closed casket.”
“Christ. I’m sorry I asked. I just keep finding his stuff, and…” I trailed off uselessly.
“No, it’s fine. How is the cleanup going?”
“Oh Lord.” I looked around at the house. I suppose it was better, given that I’d gotten the kitchen mostly cleaned out and moved the stacks of newspapers. I was grimly aware of the untouched second floor above me. For a minute I felt like I was in a cave and I could feel tons and tons of weight pressing down, except that instead of stone, it was old magazines and Franklin Mint plates and boxes from the Home Shopping Network.
I looked out the kitchen window, hoping for relief, and caught a flash of movement. There was a woman walking through the woods on the far side of the yard. She glanced at the house curiously, but kept walking. I wondered if she was the same woman I’d seen while walking Bongo the other day.
“Mouse?”
“Sorry—someone out in the woods. Hiker. Just distracted me for a second. I’m making some progress. I’ve gotten a good chunk of the downstairs done. I haven’t even started on the upstairs, or the dead baby room.”
“The what?!”
“Ah—” I laughed again, a bit more genuinely this time. “Sorry! Did you know she collected dolls?”
“I knew she had a few.” He groaned. “Oh Lord. She didn’t have just a few of anything, did she?”
“ ’Fraid not. The room looks like a
morgue for dead plastic babies. I’m starting on it tomorrow.”
I could almost see him shaking his head. “If you want me to send in the bulldozers, just say the word.”
“Nah,” I said. “Or not yet, anyway. I really am making progress.”
“You don’t have to do it just because I asked, Mouse.”
I paused. The correct answer was, Yes, I know. The true answer was, Yes, I do.
I waited too long, and he said, “I could un-ask, you know.”
I was shocked by my own resistance to the idea. A few days ago I’d been seriously contemplating throwing in the towel. Now, having seen the carved rocks, I wanted to get to the bottom of Cotgrave’s mystery. Even if they weren’t his creations, he’d clearly seen them and felt strongly about them, to have written that litany in his journal over and over.
And I twisted myself around like the twisted ones.…
Had he found them by accident, just like I had?
If I could find his typed manuscript, maybe that would help me learn what was going on with the rocks. If I could find the Green Book, that would definitely help.
Unfortunately, the only way I was going to do that was to dig through forty-odd years of my grandmother’s life.
“It’s fine, Dad,” I said. “I kind of want to see this finished. But if I get to the second floor and it’s just an unspeakable mess, I’ll let you know.”
“All right. Offer’s open.”
“How are you doing?” I asked, changing the subject.
“Oh, you know…” He trailed off. I listened to him wheeze for a few minutes. “They’ve given me an oxygen tank. There’s still nothing wrong with me, to hear the doctor tell it, except for the bit where I’m not breathing.”
“Maybe the oxygen will help,” I said.
“I’m sure it will,” he said, and we both knew he was lying, and we both knew that I knew. But families run on optimistic lies sometimes, so neither of us called the other one out on it and we said goodbye.
The Twisted Ones Page 9
