Crooked House

by Joe McKinney

  That was all before dinner. A little while ago, maybe an hour or so, he’d slipped into silence and they hadn’t heard so much as a peep from upstairs. Mother and daughter had waited nervously for what would come next, but after a while it began to seem that he’d calmed down, or perhaps even gone to sleep.

  So they made dinner and afterwards played a few hands of Uno and then went down to the master bedroom to watch the video feed on Sarah’s laptop.

  There was nothing on the recordings, just hours of footage showing empty rooms, and Sarah was a little shocked to discover that she was disappointed. She had expected to see something, what she wasn’t sure, maybe a door closing by itself, maybe a curtain rustling for no reason. She didn’t know, exactly, what she hoped to see, but it certainly wasn’t a lot of nothing.

  “Maybe nothing happens when the cameras are on, like when you take your car to the mechanic and it doesn’t make that noise.”

  Sarah smiled. “I bet you’re right. That’s probably exactly what it is.” She sighed and turned the computer’s display back to the live feed. “What do you say, kiddo, sleep in here with me tonight?”

  Angela nodded, but she looked uncertain.

  “What is it?”

  “What about...” Her eyes shifted toward the ceiling, toward Robert’s study.

  “I don’t think he’ll come down, baby. He’s got that cot up there.”

  Angela looked like she wanted to believe, but some intuition held her back.

  “I promise you, we’ll be okay. You got me, kiddo, forever and for always.”

  Angela nodded.

  Sarah took her daughter in her arms and held her close. “We’re gonna be all right, baby. I’m here with you and I’m not going anywhere.”

  *

  Come here you little shit. Mommy’s not gonna hurt you.

  Sarah bolted upright in bed. She was breathing hard, her chest heaving, her body and hair wet with sweat. For a moment, she was disoriented. She didn’t know where she was,and panic felt like a frantic little rat trying to claw its way out of her skull. The sheets were twisted around her legs. They too were soaking wet. She gripped them and closed her eyes and pushed the panic back down.

  Come here you little shit. Mommy’s not gonna –.

  That hideous phrase still echoed out of her dreams, so full of menace, so nasty. Groaning, she hugged her knees to her chest. The images in her mind were horrible. They made her feel dirty, tainted somehow, like her skin was covered with soot. Even with her eyes shut tight Sarah saw again a crazed woman sometimes sobbing, sometimes screaming as she staggered down the east wing, pounding on the door to Angela’s old room, then forcing her way inside and strangling one of the small children, a little boy who’d been cowering in the corner,before rising from the corpse and coming after the other child, sayingCome here you little –

  Panic gripped her again.Angela! Where was Angela?They’d fallen asleep together, but the other half of the bed was empty now.

  She jumped out of the bed, yelling for her daughter.

  Sarah made it to the hallway before a thought stopped her cold.Robert.Remembering the conversation she’d had with Angela earlier about Robert never leaving his study, she felt sick to her stomach. Why hadn’t she insisted on leaving when she had the chance? She’d been stupid to stay.

  She ran for the entranceway. “Angela! Baby, where are you? Angela!”

  God damn you, Robert, she thought. If you’ve hurt her.

  She was nearly at the top of the stairs when she heard laughing, and the sound of children running down the east wing hall.

  Sarah froze in her tracks, listening.

  Then, that same voice she’d heard in her dreams, broken, filled with rage and frustration and madness:You make so much goddamned noise.

  With her heart pounding and dizziness threatening to send her tumbling back down the stairs, she mounted the landing and turned toward the east wing. It was dark down there, and one of the curtains rustled from the air conditioner, but the hallway was empty. And the sounds of running feet were gone.

  She closed her eyes, and got a hold of herself.

  Angela, she thought. Focus on Angela.

  She went down the short hallway that led to Robert’s study, and stopped at the door. He was in there alone, at his desk, looking at his laptop. His eyes were red and puffy, like he’d been crying, and his hair was a mess. But it wasn’t so much his appearance as the sounds coming from his laptop that alarmed her.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “Are you watching porn?”

  The look he gave her stopped her in her tracks.

  “What?” she said.

  He flipped his laptop around so she could see it, so she could see herself on her knees in the bed of a pickup, sucking the dick of some guy she couldn’t even remember the name of anymore.

  “Oh no,” she said. “Oh Robert, I – ”

  He just stared at her, all expression gone from his face. He looked so cold, so remote.

  “I don’t know what to say, Robert.”

  “Yeah, I guess there’s not a lot you can fucking say, is there? I mean, not with your mouth full.”

  “Oh Jesus, Robert, don’t be so crass.”

  “Crass? Holy shit, did you say crass?” He gestured at the laptop. “What the fuck is this? I think there’s a still from this fucking movie in the dictionary next to the definition of crass.”

  “Don’t be mean. Please. We can talk about this, but right now I need your help. I can’t find Angela.”

  “Oh,” he said, and tapped the side of his head. “Speaking of Angela, guess who brought me this little cinematic tour de force. Your old boyfriend, Jay Carroll. He’s in town. Did you know that? Yeah, he’s in town, and he wants that blood test. He also brought me another copy of his attorney’s note. Remember that? That’s the one with that line in it about him having documentary proof that the birth mother is morally unfit to raise a teenage girl. You remember that, right? Well, I guess I finally know what he means.”

  “Robert, I…I’m sorry. I can’t even begin to tell you how sorry I am about this. I owe you a huge explanation, and you’ll get it, I promise. But please, right now, I need you to help me find Angela. I want to leave this house tonight. I don’t care what we do, where we go, but I want to leave this place right now.”

  His eyes narrowed. “You want to go?” he said. “That’s just great. You know where the door is. Feel free to get the fuck out.”

  “Robert, don’t – please.”

  He rose from his seat so quickly, and with such anger, that she took three steps back. “Don’t you...fucking...God damn it, Sarah. Do you have any idea what this will do to me? He wants to show this to the University. Do you have any idea how fast this is going to get me thrown out of this position?”

  She was scared, but now she was angry too. The son of a bitch.

  “You’re making this about you. Nice, Robert. Real nice.”

  “Don’t you dare try to lay blame with me, Sarah. Don’t you dare. I have never been so completely and utterly offended in my entire life. I am angry now, Sarah. It’s almost paralyzing I’m so angry. You have betrayed me.”

  “I betrayed you? Robert, you bastard. You have no – ”

  “Yes,” he said. His face was turning red. “You betrayed me! Me, Sarah. I looked at the date of production on this thing. We had already started dating when you made this. Hadn’t we?Hadn’t we?”

  “Please don’t shout at me.”

  “Hadn’t we?Answer the fucking question, Sarah.”

  She nodded.

  “Christ,” he said. He dropped back into his chair, his body shaking he was so disgusted and angry. “You know, I never really asked you about your past. I knew you had trouble with your dad, and I respected that you didn’t want to talk about it. I knew you had done some topless dancing for a while, and that made me jealous as hell, but I didn’t ask you about that either because it was before we met and the past was yours to share with me if you wanted. But this
…” He gestured at the laptop and shrugged helplessly. “You were working as a whore when we were dating.”

  “You bastard! You take that back. Take it back right now.”

  “What did I say that wasn’t true? Huh, tell me that and I’ll take it back.”

  “I am no one’s whore, Robert. No one’s.”

  “Well, except for Cowboy Slim here.”

  “You have no right to talk to me that way. You have no idea what it was like. I was a single mother with a little baby to feed. You, I had no idea if you were gonna stick around. You used to look scared to death every time you picked Angela up. Twenty-five hundred dollars was a fortune to me back then.”

  He scoffed. “Twenty-five hundred dollars? You sold our future down the river for twenty-five hundred dollars?”

  “I was in a corner, Robert. I had no choice.”

  “You had a choice. You had me!”

  She shook her head. “Robert, I can’t do this right now. I have to find Angela. Please.”

  He said nothing. Just looked toward the wall.

  “Will you answer me?”

  Nothing.

  “I’ll have my cell phone with me, Robert. Please, think about this. Think of everything we’ve been through. We can get through this too.”

  If he even heard her he made no sign of it.

  “I love you, Robert. I always have and I always will. I’m so sorry.”

  Weeping, she turned and left his office. She was halfway down the stairs when Angela walked across the entranceway, still in her PJs and slippers.

  “Angela!”

  She headed down the stairs.

  “Mom.” The girl looked surprised, but not a bit flustered.

  “Where were you? I was calling for you.”

  “I got a drink of water. Mom, have you been crying?”

  “I was worried sick about you.”

  “I’m sorry. I should have – “ Angela broke off there. Her gaze was staring somewhere over Sarah’s shoulder, up the stairs, her eyes wide and full of fear.

  Sarah slowed and looked behind her.

  On the landing, near the door to the sitting room, was a woman dressed in soiled rags that had once been finery, hair wild and ratty, hands like gnarled claws. Her eyes were milky and bulging, and they were fixed on her. Sarah backed down the last few steps, horrified by the tortured grin on the woman’s pale white face. The woman’s eyes were rimmed in red, and pain and loneliness and dread came with her as she stepped to the head of the stairs.

  “Mommy!”

  Sarah stepped off the bottom of the stairs and grabbed Angela’s hand.

  Come here you little shit. Mommy’s not gonna hurt you.

  Hearing that was enough for Sarah. She pulled Angela toward the door.

  “Mommy, what about Daddy?”

  “Come on,” she said. She grabbed her keys from the bowl by the side of the door and threw it open. “We have to go right now.”

  “But...”

  “He’s not coming, Angela. Please, let’s go.”

  December 24

  Robert fell asleep on the cot in his office a little after first light and slept to mid-afternoon. He’d raged through most of the night, and now, as he stepped over piles of books and broken picture frames, he was alarmed and a little giddy by all the damage he’d caused. He had vague memories of causing the damage, throwing things around and pulling down curtains, even taking the antique bat to the pictures on the walls and the liquor cabinet along the north wall, but the images were coming to him in bits and pieces, like a drunk calling forth disjointed images of a bad bender. He touched his chest where a caustic burning feeling seemed to be growing. His head hurt too. He reached down to put a few of the books back on the shelves, and when he stood up again, the pain in his head came on so strong he nearly fainted.

  His cell phone rang. Thom Horner’s ringtone. The phone had been ringing most of that morning, both the house phone and his cell, but he’d ignored the calls. Partly because he couldn’t work up the strength to pull himself out of bed and partly because he had no desire to talk with anyone.

  Not Thom, not Sarah. Jesus, especially not Sarah.

  There was a problem that was going to take years to make right again.

  What had he said to her last night? He remembered railing against her, calling her a whore, twisting the blade of his cruelty yet another turn, even as she begged for his forgiveness. He’d been a huge, dunderheaded ass. No doubt about that.

  He sat down at his laptop and turned it on. The DVD was still running. Gritting his teeth, he ejected it, glanced at the title again, and threw it against the wall.Back in the Saddle 4, what an obscenity. He ran his hands over his face and head and came up with a clump of hair in each hand. The ringworm had spread to his scalp, he realized. Another obscenity. God, he thought, what’s wrong with me?

  It was this house. It had control of him, and had been exercising that control since they moved in. He was sure of that. It was affecting his moods, his actions, and, he realized as he glanced at the ringworm spreading down his arms, even his health. And whatever was in this house was strongest from late afternoon deep into the night. No wonder he could never get to sleep until early morning. And no wonder he could think a little more clearly now. He just wished he knew what it wanted. He wanted to know where all of this was leading.

  I should leave, he thought. Just get up and go. Leave it all behind.

  But he answered himself with the same mental breath: Where was he going to go? Where was there to go at this point? He had this job, this house, and...well, nothing else. He had no money in the bank, no way to support his wife and his child, and no way to fight Jay Carroll’s attempt to take his daughter from him. He couldn’t go to Thom Horner, or even Anthony Udoll. If anyone at Lightner heard what he had to say, he’d be ruined. He was stuck.

  He had nowhere to go.

  How was that possible? His head was swirling. He hadn’t seen any of this coming, but it came just the same. It came, and it had run over him like a freight train.

  But he couldn’t leave Sarah and Angela hanging like this. They were, after all, the reason his heart was broken. Weren’t they? Hadn’t he been through so much, and all of it on their behalf.

  He thought so.

  Robert went into the home e-mail he shared with Sarah and began typing a message:

  Hey Sarah,

  Last night, I was a royal ass. I let you down. What you could have used was a man willing to stand up for your honor, a real knight in shining armor. What you got was a putz.

  I’m sorry.

  I’m guilty as charged.

  Look, I want to explain it all, and I wish I was the kind of man who could sit in front of you and say it in words, but we both know that isn’t me. I do my best thinking at this keyboard, and since you’ve been gone, I’ve been thinking a lot.

  I’ve been thinking how mad I am. I’ve been thinking that you fucking blew some guy you didn’t even know – and did it for money no less – while we were dating. While I was trying to put my life and my feelings and my love for you in some kind of order. While I was trying to make it all make sense to my twenty-six-year-old brain. You came into my life with a kid and (let’s face it, we both know it’s true) some serious emotional baggage, like your father, your relationship with Jay, all of it. But I fell in love with you. I fell in love with you even though you and the responsibilities that came with loving you scared me to death. That’s how crazy in love with you I was.

  I confess I could use some emotional sophistication – even now, at 36 – but this is what you married. You agreed to this guy. You have to be the one to put this into some kind of sense for me, because you’re the one who made it all not make sense.

  So please, respond.

  But first, before you fire off some broadside, know that I love you. You said that to me, and I was too mad – too chickenshit, maybe – to say it back. But I do. I love you. With all my heart. I am, and always will be, the man who loves you
with every – ”

  With every what?

  Christ, what was there for a man to say at this point that didn’t sound like the worst sort of cliché ever spoken?

  He put his head down on his keyboard and groaned. This was fake, all of it. The e-mail, the sentiment behind it, his own conceited belief that he could put so much feeling into an e-mail that it would save his marriage. Fake.

  Such things were the province of poets, not scholars.

  This wasn’t working. He saved the message into his Drafts folder and folded up the laptop. Maybe she’d read it later.

  Robert heard a noise from the far side of the room, and when he looked up, James Crook, wearing a tuxedo, the antique bat resting on his shoulder, was standing in the corner, looking at the ruined pictures on the wall.

  “Hey,” Robert said. “Hey, you’re...”

  Crook glanced over at him. “I’m in all of these. Did you know that?”

  “Huh?”

  “These pictures. Like this one. I’m right here, second row, third from the left.”

  “But you’re...you’re...”

  He was older than Robert, but didn’t look it. He was taller, leaner, a handsome man with slicked-back black hair and a little pencil thin mustache and the easy, catlike grace of an athlete. He smiled, and his teeth were perfect.

  The kind of smile you’d expect from a dentist, Robert thought.

  “I’m what, Bob?”

  “You’re James Crook, the man who built this house. But you’re...you’re...”

  Crook was smiling. Robert had trouble catching his breath. His head still hurt and he was foggy with lack of sleep and confused by the strangeness of seeing this man here, and talking with him, a man he knew to be dead. He tried again.

  “But...you’re dead. Aren’t you?”

  Crook frowned, then started laughing.

  “But you died eighty years ago. You hanged yourself.” Robert looked up, into the rafters. Even in the gathering shadows of late afternoon, he thought he could see the faint cut in the wood, the groove left by the rope. What had it been, a week that he’d hung there, before someone thought to check on him? He must have gotten really ripe in the Texas heat, with no air conditioner. The skin would have stretched and blackened as the body filled with decomposition gases. In a week’s time, at that temperature, he would have burst. It would have gotten all over everything. “It was right there,” Robert said. “Right there.”