The barn door is open about six inches. I sidle in, careful not to jostle the door. Stepping into the dark from the blinding snowstorm, I can’t make out anything right away. It’s not completely dark, though. What’s left of the day is filtering in through gaps between the slatted walls and holes in the roof.
As my eyes adjust, I can see that like the rest of Mattie’s property, the barn’s falling apart. And it’s full of junk. There are stacks of cardboard cartons splitting at the seams, old rusty farm equipment standing around like dinosaur skeletons, the carcass of an old rusted-out Chevy pickup truck that Davis would give his eyeteeth for, and, hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the barn, a huge iron hook that looks like something from a slasher movie. That’s where the stupid teenage girl who went exploring (that’s me) would find a dead body hanging—
Something stirs behind the truck. I grip the knife handle in my pocket and take a step forward. “Davis?” I call. “Is that you?” Like he’d answer if it were. I take another step, my eyes on the shadows behind the truck. There’s a ray of light coming from a hole in the roof. It’s hard to take my eyes off it, but I try to look in the shadows instead. “Hey, I’m sorry we ran like that. Oren was so scared—he thought he killed you. He’ll be so glad to know he didn’t. You know he didn’t mean anything by it. He was just trying to keep you from doing something you’d be sorry about later . . .” As I step around the front of the truck something moves. I pull the knife out of my pocket and lunge for it, stepping into the beam of light. Something hits my head and I bring up my arm to protect myself, cowering against the next blow, already pleading for him to stop—
But all that comes is a cascade of feathers. It was only a bird: I watch as it flies up to land on a long chain that runs the length of the barn and sets that goddamned hook to swaying. The sound the hook makes is awful, like a puppy dying, but even worse is the smell that comes off it. It smells like . . . rot and blood. It smells like death. Maybe it was where the farmers slaughtered their cows and hung them up to bleed out. Like Travis did with a deer one time. Ugh.
I prowl the length of the barn, stomping my feet to shake off the cold and disrupting a family of mice from their home in a filing cabinet, but find no human intruder. Nothing valuable or pawnable either. Aside from the rusting farm equipment, the barn seems mostly full of paper. File folders, fat bound documents with big state seals on their covers, and like a century’s worth of old newspapers. These have blown around and plastered the whole barn. I pick up one and read the date: August 17, 1953.
Whoa. That’s old even for Mattie. Hoarding must run in the family. I pick up one of the legal documents and check out the judge’s name. The Honorable Matthew T. Lane. I bet that was Mattie’s father. No wonder they had this big old house; he was a judge.
Something moves behind me and I spin around, my heart in my throat, picturing Davis. But it’s only a stack of newspapers sliding down from the top of the filing cabinet. I must have jarred it when I opened the drawer. The avalanche of papers reaches my feet, one paper lapping up over the toe of my boot like an overfriendly lapdog. I reach down and pick it up. It’s a Poughkeepsie paper, yellow, from the eighties. On the front is a picture of an old man in a judge’s robes, looking smug and pleased with himself the way judges do, like he’s won an award for something or he just sent some lowlife scum to juvie because she stole a couple of dollars from her cheap-ass foster parents. I recognize that look—and I recognize that face. He looks just like Mattie.
I start to kick the paper away—I don’t need to read about how great Mattie’s family was—but then I catch a bit of the caption. “Respected judge dies . . .”
I snatch up the paper and read the story.
Judge Matthew T. Lane was found dead in his home in Delphi, New York, along with his wife and ten-year-old son. Police suspect accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. The only remaining family member, Judge Lane’s 25-year-old daughter, Mattea Lane, discovered the bodies when she came home—
“If you wanted some reading material there’s plenty in the house.”
I nearly piss my pants, she startles me so bad. Mattie is standing not three feet from me, arms folded over her ample chest, with that same smug look on her face as her father’s.
I toss the newspaper onto the pile at my feet. “I thought I saw someone out here and I came to check it out. A bunch of newspapers fell over and I was just picking them up.”
My hand itches to grab the knife, but if I do Mattie could say I was threatening her, so I don’t. Mattie smirks and looks around the barn. “Because you wanted to leave things neat?”
“Yeah, it’s a mess in here. A fire hazard. You really should clear it out . . . and what the hell is that hook for? It looks like something out of a horror movie.”
She gives me a look like I’m an idiot, the way that Lisa used to look at me when I didn’t know something about living in the country. City kid, she’d call me, even though I’d spent most of my childhood in foster homes in upstate New York. “It’s a hay pulley that was used for lifting hay bales into the loft,” Mattie says, then she points at the knife I laid on the filing cabinet. “Did you scare off the intruder with that?”
“There wasn’t anyone out here, but they could have gotten away before I reached the barn.” I suddenly remember that Oren’s alone in the house.
Mattie must realize the same thing. “Let’s get back,” she says, reaching past me to pick up the knife. “We shouldn’t leave Oren alone.” She puts the knife in the pocket of her baggy old cardigan, like she’s used to carrying weapons in there, and turns around. But then her eyes snag on the newspaper I let drop to the floor and she flinches like someone’s hit her. She walks out of the barn quick then, like she doesn’t even have to check on whether I’m following her.
I hurry to catch up with her, stopping only to pick up the newspaper and stuff it in my coat pocket. Mattie’s a pretty cool customer. I’d like to know what made her flinch like that.
Chapter Eighteen
Mattie
I DON’T STOP until I reach the back door. Why that newspaper, out of all the trash out there? (My archives, my father called them.) I didn’t even read the local papers after my family died. But they came to the house anyway—the judge subscribed to four daily papers—and at some point after I’d let them stack up on the front porch, one of the well-meaning church ladies who came by to straighten up after the tragedy must have decided they belonged in the old barn with the other junk.
Unless Alice was snooping around trying to find out more about me. To blackmail me or commit identity theft. One of our volunteers, a sweet man getting his MSW in Albany, gave his credit card to a woman to buy groceries. Big surprise, he had more than a thousand dollars in fraudulent charges on his next statement. What had seemed to bother him the most was the frivolous nature of the charges—an Xbox at Best Buy, a case of beer from the Beverage Barn—as if the poor didn’t want the same things everyone else did.
I turn to watch Alice making her way across the snow, bare head bowed, arms wrapped around her skinny chest, face pinched and intent. Her hair is plastered against her head and without its soft fall around her face she looks much older than I first took her for. Early thirties, Frank had said. More like mid-thirties, I’d say now. She’s not the poor teenage mother I’d first taken her for and sympathized with. How much else about her have I missed?
She looks up when she reaches the shelter of the porch, and there’s so much anger and resentment in her eyes that I flinch. I’ve seen that look before in abused women, that look that doesn’t just expect the next blow but says, I know I deserve it. But I’ve never gotten used to it, or liked how it made me feel, that little split-second flicker of Maybe you do.
Most of the people who come before my bench have done something to get themselves there, my father used to say. You’re not doing them any favors by feeling sorry for them and not holding them accountable.
“What?” Alice demands like a surly teenager. “
What are you waiting for?”
“You,” I say. “I wanted to make sure you made it.”
“You should have gone right in to check on Oren. He doesn’t like being alone.” She pushes past me into the mudroom and then stops, listening to something. I close the door behind me and listen too. It’s Oren, talking, but to whom?
Alice rushes into the kitchen and I follow, my hand on the knife. When I reach the kitchen, though, I see that except for Dulcie, who’s sleeping under the table, Oren is alone. He’s standing at the stove stirring the chili with one hand and holding one of the empty tin cans to his ear with the other. A six-inch-tall shaggy figure stands on the counter.
“Who are you talking to?” Alice demands.
Oren rolls his eyes and holds up the empty tin can. “I’m listening to orders from the rebel base and relaying them to Chewbacca, of course. Who were you talking to out in the barn?”
Alice blanches like he’s caught her at something. Was there someone out there? Maybe an accomplice I don’t know about? “No one. There was no one out there. Hey, didn’t you lose your Chewbacca?”
“This is one of Caleb’s,” Oren answers. Hearing Caleb’s name drop so casually out of his mouth gives me a chill.
“Where’d you find it?” Alice asks.
When he doesn’t answer right away I suggest, as gently as I can, “Maybe you found them in the Star Wars lunch box upstairs. I don’t mind, buddy. I was going to give them to you anyway.”
Oren shakes his head. “That’s not where I found him. He showed up right here in the kitchen to remind me to stir the chili. It was going to burn otherwise, Mattie.”
“Toys don’t just show up out of nowhere,” Alice says, an edge in her voice as if Oren has made this claim before. “Did you go into that boy’s room and take his toys?”
“It really doesn’t matter,” I interject quickly. She has some nerve attacking Oren for stealing when she’s been in my medications. “As I said, I was going to give him all the toys in that lunch box—”
“Why?” Alice asks, wheeling on me. “So Oren could use them to speak to your dead brother?”
I’m so flabbergasted that I don’t know what to say. Where in the world did Alice get that idea? Before I can think of an answer Alice is at me, shoving her face in mine, spit flying from her hard little mouth. “I heard you asking him if he heard voices. What kind of a social worker takes advantage of a child’s fantasy world to feed her own neuroses? That’s sick! I’m going to report you to the Department of Social Services.”
It shouldn’t, but this makes me laugh. It’s a bad habit of mine, laughing when I’m nervous. “Really? Are you going to report yourself at the same time? Are you going to turn yourself and Oren in while you’re at it and watch Oren end up in juvie?”
Alice’s face turns as bright red as the chili Oren is stirring. “Don’t you dare threaten me with that! You fucking—”
“Stop it!” Oren shoves himself in between us. He drops the tin can but holds on to the wooden spoon, and gobs of hot chili fly off and hit Alice in the face. She lets out a horrible shriek and lunges for Oren’s hand, but he backs up, brandishing the spoon like a weapon.
“You little shit!” Alice screams.
His eyes widen and his face goes white. “You . . . you . . .” The words sputter out of his lips. “You are NOT my mother!” Then he flings the spoon at Alice and runs from the kitchen.
Alice is so startled by the blow, which has spread chili across her face and hair, that she stands there frozen for a long moment. Then she turns to me, her face streaked with red sauce, her eyes stricken. “This is your fucking fault,” she spits at me, before she turns and leaves the kitchen, calling Oren’s name as she goes.
I listen to her voice as it travels upstairs. But what I’m hearing is Oren’s words.
You are not my mother.
It’s a thing that kids have screamed at their rightful parents for generations. I said it to my own mother in this very kitchen.
Good. Who’d want a hateful girl like you for a daughter? she’d responded.
But the way Alice looked when he said it has made something click in my head. A lot of things, actually. The way Oren flinched when Alice touched him. The fact that he always calls her Alice. The fact that, now that I think about it, they don’t look all that much alike. Oren has dark, curly hair and brown eyes. Alice is fair with washed-out blue eyes.
I reach into my coat pocket, find my phone, and then take out the charger from my cardigan pocket. I plug the phone into an outlet next to the stove, then pick up the spoon and tin can from the floor. As I’m picking up the tin can I hear something—a murmuring like the sound you hear when you press a conch shell to your ear. Before I can question why I’m doing it, I lift the can and hold it to my ear—
“Matt?”
I drop the can like it’s on fire. There were only two people who ever called me Matt and one of them is dead.
I’m reaching to pick up the can again when my real phone buzzes to life on the counter. I look at it and see that I have a text message on the screen from Doreen:
Called Dept. of Child Welfare. Alice isn’t Oren’s mother. Not even stepmother. She’s the next-door neighbor who babysits. The father
The text is cut off there. I have to swipe it to get the rest of the message, but my hands are too damp and shaking (Was that Caleb’s voice?). I take two steps to reach the mudroom to grab a towel from the top of the dryer . . . and hear something behind me at the back door.
It’s the doorknob turning.
Above the doorknob, in the plate-glass window silhouetted against the static gray of the snow, is a hooded figure.
I reach beneath the pile of towels for the bowie knife. As my hand curls around the handle, the lights go out.
Chapter Nineteen
Alice
I HEAR OREN running up the stairs and follow him, but when I get to the top he’s nowhere to be seen and all the doors in the long hallway are closed. He’s hiding from me. I could be mad but that’s on me. I taught him to play hide-and-seek. It was our first game together when he started hanging around my back porch.
Our porches were next to each other. In the summer I sat out there to smoke after my shift at the diner. Davis would come out and offer me a beer. Oren would play with his toys. Han Solo and Luke and Leia, that was all he talked about. I told him I thought Star Wars was cool, even though I wasn’t really into all that spaceship and lightsaber stuff. But it was nice to have company and Davis—Davis had this slow smile that made you feel like you were something special, and I didn’t have anyone else in my life who made me feel like that. So maybe at first I was nice to the kid because I liked Davis, which is ironic because by the end I was just staying with Davis because of Oren. But back then I wanted to spend some time alone with Davis, so I told Oren that I’d play hide-and-seek with him.
“Yeah,” Davis said, winking at me, “you go hide, son. We’ll come looking for you.”
Oren had looked at his father doubtfully, but then he’d turned to me and handed me one of his grimy little toys. A plastic dog with its tail broken off. “This is Chewbacca,” he told me. “He’ll help you look for me. I’ll leave clues that you can follow but you have to count to a hundred before you come looking so I have time to hide good.”
“We’ll give you plenty of time, sport, now . . . scram!” Davis had lunged forward and shouted in a scary growl that made Oren yelp and my heart skip a beat. But then Oren was laughing as he ran and I figured that was just how they played. What did I know about how fathers played with their kids? The foster parents I lived with never had time for that “nonsense”; even Travis and Lisa, who gave us big speeches about being a “family,” always had another chore we had to do when we asked to play games. So I laughed too and started counting, but Davis started calling out random numbers to mess me up and then he pulled out a joint and we sat out there smoking and drinking. When we did get around to going inside and looking for Oren we saw that he
’d set up this whole elaborate game for us to find him. He’d left his toys with goofy messages taped to them, like “Look someplace stinky,” which turned out to be in Davis’s Nikes, where we found another toy with another message—“Look someplace sweet,” which meant the sugar bowl.
That’s what he’s done now. I see the Wookiee standing on the windowsill on the landing with a Post-it note stuck to its feet.
I turn the Wookiee over and read the note.
“Find me where the hunter stalks the hare.”
Well, crap, Oren’s gotten a little more sophisticated since “Look someplace stinky.” This clue probably has something to do with the mythology book or that constellation book Mattie gave him. Could he have read it so fast? Maybe. I forget how smart he is sometimes. Scary smart, Davis used to say.
If it’s stars, then I know where he’s hiding. Caleb’s room, with the stars on the ceiling. Plus if Oren did take the Star Wars toys he’s probably looking for more. I’ll give him a few more minutes to sit and stew, though. There’s something else I need to read.
I take the newspaper out of my pocket and glance down the stairs to check for Mattie, glad there’s only this one staircase up, no back stairs like in some old houses. But there’s no one there. Mattie’s probably in the kitchen calling that cop. Maybe that’s not a bad idea. If that figure I saw was Davis . . . but no, there was no one in the barn and it’s snowing too hard for Davis—or that cop—to get out here.
I unfold the old newspaper and read the rest of the story about how Mattie’s family died.
Judge Matthew T. Lane was found dead in his home in Delphi, New York, along with his wife and ten-year-old son. Police suspect accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. The only remaining family member, Judge Lane’s 25-year-old daughter, Mattea Lane, discovered the bodies when she came home in the morning after being forced to spend the night at a friend’s house because of a blizzard. When she entered the house she smelled gas. She found the judge in his study, unconscious and unresponsive. Mrs. Lane, née Celeste Van Allen, was found dead in her bedroom. Ten-year-old Caleb Lane was not at first discovered, leading to the conjecture that he had escaped his parents’ fate, but after an exhaustive search of the house and grounds, Chief Henry Barnes discovered the body of the boy outside in the barn, where he had apparently died of hypothermia and exposure to the elements.
The Night Visitors Page 12
