Crooked House

by Joe McKinney

  *

  When he got home he called out to Sarah from the entryway but got no answer. She was home though, he was pretty sure of that. The movers had come and gone, and they’d left her Buick. He frowned at the oil stain the heap had already managed to leave on the flagstone drive, and he was still frowning as he went inside, where leaning piles of boxes lined the walls below both staircases. God, they were a mess. Thinking back to the old-fashioned headlines he’d been reading in theLight’s society pages, he could almost see the story:

  FLORIDA WHITE TRASH INVADES ONE OF

  SAN ANTONIO’S FINEST HOMES!

  Neighbors Aghast

  But the next instant he heard dishes clanking in the kitchen, and the smile left his face.

  “Sarah?”

  No answer.

  He made his way to the back of the house. Sarah and Angela were in the kitchen, Angela stacking hand towels in one of the three pantries while Sarah stacked plates in the cabinets.

  “Hi,” he said.

  Sarah didn’t say anything. Instead she looked over at Angela and gestured for the child to leave. Angela left the pantry and touched Robert’s arm on the way out. “Hi, Daddy.”

  “Hi, Baby.”

  She broke into a run, yelling “Bye, Daddy,” as she hustled out.

  “Bye,” he said.

  He turned to Sarah.

  She was looking at him, her expression dark and full of menace. She waited for a second, and when he didn’t say anything, spread her arms wide. “Well, what the hell?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Where in the hell were you? I tried calling you all afternoon.”

  “I put my phone on silent for the meetings.”

  “Which were supposed to be over at 2.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She was wearing faded jeans with holes at the knees, flip-flops and a tattered, black AC/DC concert shirt. Her bangs were sweat-soaked and hanging down her forehead. Her face was flushed, but whether from all the work she’d been doing, or from her anger with him, Robert couldn’t tell.

  “I’m really sorry,” he said. “I know I screwed up.”

  “Stop saying that. I don’t give a damn if you’re sorry. Do you know all the crap I had to take care of today? I could have really used your help, Robert.” She stopped there, and suddenly her emotions left her. She didn’t look angry anymore, or hurt, just blandly uninterested. “You smell like beer,” she said tiredly.

  “I had a few with Thom over lunch.”

  “Which was what, about eight hours ago?”

  He shrugged.

  “Great,” she said.

  “Sarah, I’m sorry.” Anger flickered in her eyes again, and he winced. “I’m sorry. I mean, oh damn it, Sarah...I screwed up, okay? I admit it. You needed me here and I was busy poking around the library. I don’t know what else to say. I let you down, and I’m sorry.”

  “You were at the library?”

  Like it was a dirty word.

  He shook his head. “You’re not gonna let this go, are you? Damn it, Sarah, I was wrong. I should have been here and I wasn’t. I get it. Stop beating me up over it.”

  She looked like she wanted to lay into him with a fresh salvo, but couldn’t find the right words to do it. She stammered for a moment, and then finally gave up with an angry huff. There was a towel on the counter behind her. She took it up, wiped her hands and her brow, and then threw it on the butcher’s block between them.

  As she walked out he heard her muttering: “Fucking library. Wonderful.”

  He watched her go, thinking to himself that he’d actually gotten off pretty easily.

  *

  They avoided each other for the next hour or so. But by degrees the emotional weather in the house warmed and they were finally able to settle down together in the conservatory, which they were using as their TV room, and watchedCharlton Heston in the originalPlanet of the Apes until it was time for Angela to go to bed.

  After the movie they went out to the entryway, where Angela promptly sprinted to the top of the stairs, and from the landing yelled, “It was Earth all the time!”

  “What a goose,” Sarah said.

  Both Robert and Sarah laughed, and she offered him a little smile. They followed Angela upstairs, put her to bed, and as they went through their nightly routine of kisses and goodnights, Robert found his spirits brighter than they’d been in days, perhaps even weeks. He sensed that he’d been forgiven for his stupidity earlier in the day, and things were right in the world again.

  They went into the kitchen and Sarah made them drinks, a vodka and tonic for him, a Sea Breeze for her.

  She raised her glass and he his.

  “To our new house,” she said.

  “To us,” he corrected.

  She smiled, and they clinked glasses.

  “To us,” she said.

  The liquor hit the back of his throat. “Mmm, that’s good,” he said. Sarah always did make the best drinks. A benefit, no doubt, of the work she’d done as a bartender and waitress before she met him. “I didn’t know we had vodka.”

  “Well, I had to go shopping today. We didn’t have anything.”

  He nodded. That was true.

  “Angela and I went to Costco after the movers left. Check out the fridge.”

  He opened the refrigerator and whistled appreciatively. It was fully stocked with chicken breasts, tubes of hamburger meat, several kinds of fruit, milk, cheese, eggs, orange juice, sour cream, salsa, the cranberry juice she’d used for her sea breeze. They were set. “Wow,” he said.

  “Oh, we bought a tree too.”

  “A tree?”

  “Yeah, you know, a Christmas tree? Christmas is next week, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “No,” he said. “I – I hadn’t.”

  “We talked about it last night, remember?”

  “Well, yeah, but...how much did all this cost?”

  “About six hundred.”

  “Six hundred...dollars?”

  “Well, yeah. And we still need to get presents for Angela. We haven’t really done much in that way. I mean, me personally, I think we can just not get each other anything this year, but we can’t skimp on her. I don’t know if you’ve noticed from the things she says her friends at school say, but between you and me, I don’t think we’re gonna get many more years with her before the whole Santa Claus thing goes away. I want to enjoy it while we can.”

  “Yeah, but six hundred dollars? That’s a lot of money.”

  She sighed and put her drink down on the butcher’s block. “Look,” she said, “I’m tired of feeling like this, like there’s never enough money.”

  “But there really is never enough money.” He frowned at her. “I’m sorry, what exactly do you want me to do?”

  “You said that if we did this move we’d get caught up, that not having a mortgage and utilities would finally put us where we needed to be.”

  “Yeah, but that takes time. It’s not something that happens overnight. We still have bills to pay. We’ve got medical bills, credit card bills, all the rest of it.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “I don’t know,” he snapped. “Maybe you could take Thom Horner up on his offer for a job.”

  “No!” she said, and he flinched from the sudden ferocity in her voice. “No, Robert, I will not go back to work for him. If you want me to go back to work, I will. I’ll work at an office somewhere, or a doctor’s office. Hell, I’ll even bag groceries down at the store. But I will not go back to work for him.”

  “Why are you mad?” he said. “I’m the one who’s supposed to be mad. Besides, I thought you liked Thom.”

  “I’m not doing it, Robert. I won’t. You can’t make me.”

  “I…I’m not making you do anything, Sarah. I’m just trying to understand.”

  She crossed her arms beneath her breasts and huffed. She wouldn’t look him in the eye. Finally, she said, “Look, just drop it, okay? If you need me to go back to
work, I will. I’ll start looking tomorrow.”

  He didn’t know what else to say. “Okay.” He shrugged.

  “Fine.” She finished off her drink and said, “I’m going to bed.”

  “Sarah, wait...”

  But she was already headed down the hall toward the master bedroom in the east wing.

  “God damn it,” he said. “God damn it all.”

  *

  Robert couldn’t get to sleep. His mind was turning over the same tired questions, the same self-doubt, the same troubles that had plagued him for at least two years now. He was spread too thin. There were so many demands on him, so many freaking bills. Where was it all going to come from? Would he ever get past it?

  He rolled over, facing one wall of the immense Victorian bedroom they’d taken as their master. The house actually came with two master suites, a larger one that they’d nicknamed the orangery because the ceiling, the curtains, the bedclothes, even the wallpaper, were orange a slightly smaller one that had been built as the wife’s chambers. The uber wealthy, it seemed, didn’t have to sleep together if they didn’t want to. And maybe there was something to that.

  He sighed, letting his gaze trace the scrolled orange vines in the wallpaper. He thought again of James Crook, of all the articles he’d read that afternoon. Why was he letting himself get mired down in these feelings of hostility and frustration? What right did he have to feel this way? He was broke, true, but his prospects were on the rise. It would only be a matter of time before things settled down and the way got smooth again, the way it had been when he and Sarah and Angela were just getting started. God, how poor they’d been! He remembered their little shoebox apartment, and how they’d made two pounds of hamburger meat stretch through a week’s worth of meals, and how a pretzel from a street vender’s cart was splurging. Yeah, they’d made it through rougher times than this. They’d make it through this too. He wasn’t nearly as bad off as Crook had been. Now there was a man who knew true grief. Imagine: his wife, his two little boys, his friends, his status, all of it gone in the span of a few short years. Robert was just sitting on the edge of the pier, dipping his toes in a sea of trouble. Crook had jumped in headfirst and drowned.

  So why was it tearing him apart like this? If he knew, and really believed, that the good times would come around again, why was he so angry all the time?

  He turned over again, this time toward Sarah – and his eyes went wide.

  With a missed heartbeat he realized he was staring at a corpse. It fumed with rot, its skin blistered and blackened and flaking away in chunks, its limbs bloated and thick from decomposition gas. The thing turned its face toward him, its glassy, milky white eyes fixed on his. The skin around the nose and mouth was punched in, wrinkled like the husk of an old apple, but even still Robert could see dark teeth glistening inside the opening. He could hear them clicking together.

  The corpse clutched at the sheets like a woman in the throes of an orgasm, its swollen, purple fingers unnatural and vile against the whiteness of the bed.

  It was sitting up.

  Robert screamed. He tried to scream anyway. The sound never left his lips. It caught somewhere in the back of his throat and died there. The corpse – it was a woman’s corpse, he could see that now, for her breasts had pancaked to her chest, even as the rest of her swelled with gas – continued to rise. It was sitting up entirely now. Its mouth fell open, revealing, for just a moment, those blackened teeth, before its hideous tongue lolled out.

  She brought one hand up, the fingers gnarled and awkward, but clutching for him.

  Robert shook his head. He groaned sickly, whimpering, and still the corpse reached for him. Its mouth was moving, like it was trying to speak to him.

  “No,” he managed to say, before throwing the covers from his legs. He rolled out of bed in a clumsy tumble, hitting his knees on the floor before staggering to his feet and wheeling around to face the bed.

  The corpse was gone.

  Sarah was sleeping there, grunting and pulling at the covers in her sleep.

  Robert stood over the bed in his underwear and old T-shirt, his chest heaving, his heart going a million miles an hour.

  He shook his head, unable to wrap his mind around the horror he’d just seen.

  Had he seen it?

  He looked around the darkened room, peering into the corners, half expecting something to lunge out of the shadows for him. But the room was still. The only sound came from his ragged breathing and Sarah’s soft snores.

  Robert let out a long breath. He wiped a hand over his face. He looked around the room again even as his breathing slowed to normal and the hammering in his chest subsided.

  “Christ,” he said.

  Well, he wasn’t going back to sleep now. Not any time soon anyway. He ran his fingers through his hair and walked out of the bedroom. The rest of the house was quiet and he could hear the wind outside gusting and catching under the eaves. For a moment he thought about going back into the bedroom and putting on some pants. It was a little chilly out here in just his tighty whities, but one glance back into the darkness of his room, and the silhouette of Sarah sleeping in their bed, was enough to carry him down the hallway and up the stairs to his study.

  Once there he felt a little better. He took the antique baseball bat down from the wall and held it, tested its heft. He’d never been much of a baseball player, but this felt really good in his hands, like it was made for him.

  That’s the sweet spot right there. Right on the meat of the bat.

  The words echoed in his head. But…what did they even mean?

  He put the bat down on his desk and stared at it. He thought of James Crook again. The papers had said he hanged himself in the house, that he was found by a maid here, in this study. The poor man, Robert thought, lonely, probably brilliant, but angry all the time, heartsick beyond salvation, pacing this spot, putting miles on this floor, the same thoughts turning round and round in his brain, thoughts that had been examined from every angle and still not seen with any clarity. How like Job he must have felt, everything taken from him. How angry he must have been. And how long, Robert wondered, had it taken him to discover that the only peace he was ever likely to find would come at the end of a rope?

  He did it here, Robert thought. This was the very spot. Looking up at the beam above his head he felt coldly certain that here, like an unreliable pendulum, James Crook had swung from the end of a rope, his body rocking, the rope creaking against the wood, his weight eventually falling still, bloating and rotting and turning the liver colors of putrefaction as it awaited discovery. This was the very spot. Of that he had no doubt.

  Yes, he thought. It was here. All those miles paced on this floor had led to right here.

  December 19

  Six Alka-Seltzers, four Motrin, and about a gallon of iced tea hadn’t even put a dent in Jay Carroll’s hangover. His stomach felt like it’d been tied in knots. His throat burned. His head wouldn’t quit throbbing. And to make all that worse, he’d been forced to get up at seven in the goddamned morning, squeeze into a suit that made him feel like he was basting in his own juices, and come down here to downtown Gainesville for some abuse from Mr. Thomas Kraft, a.k.a. Major Fucking Prick, a.k.a. His Mama’s lawyer.

  The man was trying to tell him something, but it barely penetrated the throbbing in Jay’s ears. He said: “Wait, just hold on a second. Why do we have to do all this crap? Can’t you just take her to court or something?”

  Mr. Kraft, who was tall and gaunt and wore his blue suit like he’d been born for it, sighed heavily. He put his pen down on his legal pad and adjusted the gold-rimmed glasses on his nose.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to explain to you, Jay.”

  Jay bristled. His friends called him Jay. The chicks he went out with called him Jay. That was cool. But when old jackasses like Kraft here called him by his first name it felt like he was being talked down to, like they thought he was trash. He didn’t appreciate that.
<
br />   “You need to establish paternity before any court will hear your case. Until you do that, you’ll get no closer to any sort of custody agreement. Simply put, Jay, you need firm, medically reliable testing to prove that Angela is your daughter.”

  Jay closed his eyes and pressed his fingers to his temples. His head was throbbing again, and this time it was bad enough he had to steady himself in his chair. Christ, no more fucking Jagermeister. It was a kid’s drink anyway. He was too old to be slamming that shit like he’d done last night. The coke hadn’t helped either. He’d rolled in to Kraft’s office not ten minutes ago, showered and shaved but still smelling like booze and strippers, and now he was having to process all this legal crap. It made him want to scream.

  “Just tell me what we’re supposed to do,” Jay said.

  “Well, as I mentioned, your first order of business is to get a blood test from the child. We’ll compare her blood test to yours and that should settle paternity.”

  “Okay, then send her a letter or something. Send a cop out and make her give us a blood test.”

  “We’ve sent letters.”

  “And?”

  “The child’s mother, Mrs. Sarah Bell, hasn’t responded to any of our letters to date.”

  “Well, there you go!” Jay said. “Can’t you put her in contempt or something?”

  “I’m afraid not. She’s under no legal obligation to comply with our request.”

  Jay shook his head in frustration. Sarah, goddamned Sarah, turning her back on him again. He’d dated her for about six months back in the late ‘90s, back when he was living in New York. He met her in a strip club called The Wild Horse, where she waited tables and did a little turn behind the bar now and then. Even danced for a few months, and that had been a huge turn on for him. He got a kick out of bringing his buddies into the club and watching their faces as they watched her dance. It made him feel like he owned something precious, something they all wanted but only he could have.

  Jay had been about sixty pounds lighter then. No gray hair. He’d still had that football player build he’d earned in high school. He’d been a good-looking guy, too. Even did a little acting. Three beer commercials and one for a Japanese lawn mower manufacturer by the time he hooked up with Sarah. Ecstasy was all over the New York men’s clubs back in the late ‘90s, and Sarah was nuts for the stuff. He’d show up to the club about thirty minutes before closing time, hand her a little pink pill, and by the time they cleared out she was ready to tear his pants off with her teeth. It’d been a wild six months that was for damn sure.