The Mansion

by Boone, Ezekiel

  “Will Aunt Emily come to live with us again?”

  “I don’t think so, honey. That was only for a few months, when Uncle Billy was still sick,” she said. She hugged her daughter back. Sick. Was that as honest as she could be? What would she tell the girls when they got older? Uncle Billy is a drunk and an addict and I brought Aunt Emily home because I was afraid Billy was finally going to swirl all the way down the drain and take my sister with him?

  “You should call Aunt Emily,” Rose said. “She’s really sad. Her face is all wet.”

  Beth tried to smile. “It’s probably just raining. It’s Seattle, after all.”

  “Mommy?”

  Rose let go of Beth, and Beth stood up so she could see both girls tucked neatly under the covers. She noticed that Rusty was curled up in the corner, sleeping. Why was it that the dog and her husband could sleep through the night, but the moment her daughters had a bad dream it meant that she had to be awake? “Yes, honey?” she said to Ruth.

  “Are we still going to visit Aunt Emily for Christmas?”

  “Oh, that’s a long ways off,” she said. “It’s only the first week of September. We’ve got months to go. I haven’t even bought plane tickets yet. Seattle’s fun, though. You’ll like it. We’ll stay in a hotel and get room service for breakfast and eat in bed while you’re watching cartoons. I’ll talk to Daddy and maybe we can get a room that has views of the ocean. And you know Mommy and Daddy will be happy, because there are five coffee shops on every single block in Seattle, and even better, there’s a famous fish market where the fishermen throw fish to one another. Big fish, too.” She poked Ruth in the belly. “What’s the best way to catch a fish?”

  Ruth shrugged.

  “Have someone throw it to you,” Beth said. The girls giggled, but they were already rubbing at their eyes. She could hear their breathing starting to slow. Beth tucked the blanket in on Ruth and then on Rose again. “It’ll be fun to see Aunt Emily,” Beth said.

  “No,” Ruth said. She yawned. “There’s too much snow.”

  “It doesn’t really snow in Seattle. It snows a lot more here.”

  “It won’t be Seattle. And we don’t want to go,” Rose said. Her voice was syrupy with sleep. “We want her to come here instead. Can we talk about it when she comes to visit next month?”

  “I don’t think . . .” Beth sighed. She felt tired enough to be drunk. She felt like she was in the middle of a dream herself. Sometimes that’s what it felt like arguing with the twins: they’d want something and they’d ask her in such a way that it just made her exhausted. “She isn’t going to be here next month. I don’t think we’re going to see Aunt Emily before Christmas. But we’ll talk about it in the morning, okay? It’s late, and tomorrow’s a school day. Let’s go to sleep.” The girls were already burrowing deeper into their beds, moving back toward the realm of dreams as Beth spoke, and Beth hoped that whatever they found there, in the open spaces of their sleep, it was something better than dreams of Emily crying.

  In the morning, it didn’t come up. Their nightmares were just another frightening shadow that disappeared in the light of day.

  SIX

  * * *

  WELCOME TO WHISKEY RUN

  Billy tried to turn off his alarm, tapping the screen of his phone three times before he realized the ringing wasn’t from his alarm clock, but rather from the hotel phone. His mouth was fuzzy and he remembered that he hadn’t brushed his teeth the night before. He’d come home from the baseball game and collapsed into bed. Having the whole corporate box to himself had been odd and sterile. He’d watched the entire game alone, and he’d been exhausted when he got back to the hotel. Tired. Not drunk. No, he hadn’t been drunk.

  He rolled over and grabbed the phone off the nightstand.

  “This is Wendy, Shawn’s assistant. Shawn will be waiting outside in his car in fifteen minutes, Mr. Stafford. You’ll be ready.”

  That’s how Shawn’s assistant said it. As a statement. You’ll be ready. Not a question.

  Billy rubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand. He hadn’t had enough to drink to be hungover. Three gin and tonics. Maybe four. He’d wanted a beer, too, but he could imagine somebody reporting back to Shawn that there’d been beer bottles in the trash. Instead, he poured himself the drinks from the bar at the back of the luxury box, shooting out the tonic from the fountain, and washing, drying, and replacing the glass when he was done. Three drinks over the course of three hours. No way he could be hungover. But he felt rough. Jet-lagged.

  “Yeah. Fine. I’ll be ready,” he said. “I’ve got to pack up, so I might—”

  “No need to pack, Mr. Stafford. The room is yours for as long as you are in Baltimore. I know you were planning for a shorter trip, so I’ve also taken the liberty of arranging to have new clothing, including socks and underwear, delivered to your suite while you are gone today. It will be waiting for you when you get back from Whiskey Run. If there’s anything you would like laundered, leave it on the bed, and it will be washed and pressed as well.”

  Billy pulled the phone back and just stared at it.

  “Hello? Mr. Stafford?”

  “Sorry. Yeah. Okay. I’ll be downstairs in fifteen minutes.”

  “Breakfast will be served on the flight,” Wendy said. “And there will be somebody to meet you in the lobby and take you out to Mr. Eagle’s car. A young woman named Spencer. She’ll have a coffee for you. Two sugars. As you like it.”

  The phone went quiet. No good-bye. Just silence.

  Billy put the phone back on its base and kicked the blankets off. He brushed the taste of dirt out of his mouth, slugged some mouthwash, and got into the shower. He turned the dial up as hot as he could stand and let the water wash over him. He leaned forward, elbows on the tile, eyes closed, and pissed into the drain.

  Exactly fifteen minutes and he was out of the elevator. He felt great. He was wearing what he always wore: a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Empty wallet and cell phone in his pocket, and so what if he’d lost his one-year sobriety coin? He was wearing his old shit-kicker cowboy boots, which, he liked to joke, he loved almost as much as he loved his wife, and that meant all was good in his universe. The boots needed to be resoled, but they made a satisfying knock against the floor of the lobby and they were molded to his feet. He saw the girl, Shawn’s assistant’s assistant, whatever her name was, scurrying across the lobby to him. Jesus. Pathetic. It was so sycophantic. Was that how all Shawn’s employees were? What were they so afraid of? What were they hoping for? He reached out to grab the coffee from the woman, but didn’t bother greeting her. Just a nod. He wasn’t going to see her again. And he didn’t need her to escort him to Shawn’s car. It was obvious. A Bentley such a dark blue that Billy mistook it for black, an SUV in front and an SUV behind, no doubt carrying Shawn’s security detail. The girl hustled in front of him and opened the back door of the Bentley for Billy. He slid in. Shawn was on the phone, and he held up a finger.

  The car started moving the second the door was closed, gliding so smoothly and quietly that it felt surreal. Until they hit a pothole. That felt pretty real. Shawn gave a few halfhearted uh-huhs and sures, and then told whoever it was that he’d get back to him. He hung up and gave Billy a grin.

  “Ready?”

  The truth was, Billy couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this excited. That’s why he’d had those drinks last night. He’d needed them to relax. No way he’d have gotten to sleep otherwise. Had Shawn really done it? Had Shawn finally figured out how to make Nellie happen? He could have, Billy supposed. He wouldn’t have believed it if Shawn had claimed that he’d done the work himself. Shawn was never that sort of programmer. The guy was unquestionably brilliant. Billy could admit that. But when it came to actually getting the language together, figuring out how to make Eagle Logic into something more than an idea, it had been Billy. And Takata.

  No, it was Billy. He could say that honestly. Takata was . . . No. Billy was the reason that, when th
ey’d abandoned Nellie, he and Shawn got Eagle Logic to work. If Billy had left, if Shawn had been on his own so early in the process, Eagle Logic never would have happened. Shawn wouldn’t have had shit. He’d have ended up working for Google or something and had a perfectly fine life, working his way up into management and retiring rich. Not the kind of rich he was now, but the kind of rich you could get when you didn’t have any real ideas of your own and had to join a company that was already established. Shawn was smart enough and charismatic enough that he could have done that, but nothing more. No Eagle Logic, no Eagle Technology, no fawning profiles in magazines or a bestselling authorized biography stacked up in airport bookstores. Forget Nellie; Shawn couldn’t even have figured out Eagle Logic on his own.

  But he didn’t need to, because Billy had done the heavy lifting and then walked away with Emily, just giving Shawn what went on to become the foundation of an empire. No. That wasn’t right. Billy hadn’t given Eagle Logic to Shawn. Shawn had taken it and Billy had been left with a pittance. And Emily.

  So if Shawn had told Billy that he’d made Nellie work, that he’d done it on his own, Billy would have laughed in his face and just flown back to Seattle. There was no way Shawn could have done it himself, but then again, he didn’t need to. He had a whole company at his disposal. Thousands of engineers and programmers. For all Billy knew, Shawn had had an entire team toiling away on Nellie in secret for years and years. Eagle Technology was known for its obsession with secrecy—Shawn’s obsession with secrecy—and it was entirely possible that Shawn had been running Nellie as a secret project within the company for the past decade. The people working on her might not even have all known what they were doing. Shawn could have compartmentalized it so that one group was working on this part of Nellie, another group working on that part of Nellie, and none of them seeing all the pieces laid out together.

  So when Shawn asked him if he was ready, Billy didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t wait. If Shawn had actually done it . . .

  But he knew Shawn. Knew that despite all his smiles and the cup of coffee waiting for Billy in the lobby, despite the private jet and the corporate box at the baseball game, underneath it all, Shawn was still the same devious, twisted piece of shit, keeping all kinds of secrets. There was always something behind the smile. There was always something buried.

  It wouldn’t do for Billy to play his cards too early. No, he didn’t need for Shawn to see how excited he was.

  “Sure,” Billy said, and then he was quiet and Shawn was quiet for the rest of the ride to the airport.

  The plane itself was ludicrous. Like a parody of wealth and privilege and the new generation of tech barons. How could Shawn not see how silly it looked? There was seating for twelve inside, plus, according to Shawn, a bedroom suite in the back. For sleeping and other things, he said, giving a wink. What an asshole. The seats were stitched leather, dyed midnight black, and the floor was a deep, plush carpet in oxblood red. All the rest of the surfaces were covered in glass and Eagle Titanium, the gold-infused metal almost glowing in the interior lights. There were two flight attendants, both of them with breasts so perky and smiles so white that, just for an instant, Billy wondered if Eagle Technology had branched out into androids. How else could women look so perfect?

  “This is your third-favorite jet?” Billy said.

  “It’s the first jet I bought. Got it used off a sheikh. Great deal. I had to have it redecorated, of course, and these two lovelies weren’t part of the package, but you can buy anything nowadays,” he said, gesturing to the flight attendants and then holding up his hand defensively. “I know, I know. Sexist and all that, but come on. Kind of true, right?” Neither woman’s smile dimmed even a watt at being talked about like that. They’d probably heard the joke before, Billy figured. If it was a joke.

  “When the other jets are done being redecorated, they’re going to make this one look like a pile of dog shit. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it, though. I wouldn’t get much for it if I sold it. Maybe twenty million. Not enough to bother. It makes sense just to keep it as a spare, I guess.”

  Shawn was sitting down as he spoke, belting himself into one of the overstuffed leather chairs and motioning for one of the attendants to come forward with orange juice. Four of his security men were on the plane, sitting discreetly at the back.

  Billy couldn’t stop himself from smiling. It was so patently designed to push his buttons, to show him that Shawn Eagle was a man to be reckoned with. Oh, maybe I’ll just keep this one for the hell of it. What’s twenty million dollars? It’s not even worth the trouble of selling the jet if all I can get for it is twenty million. And look, I need to travel with muscle at all times and I can buy myself as much tits and ass as I want, how’s that wife of yours anyway, you know, the one I used to sleep with before you stole her from me, what’s-her-name? Look at me, look at me, look at me!

  Billy ducked his chin to hide the smile and looked out the window. It wasn’t that Shawn was trying to show off. Not exactly, though that was part of it. No. Billy knew Shawn. No matter how many years had gone by, the man hadn’t changed, and Billy could see it: Shawn was still a scared little orphan boy.

  If Billy weren’t already smiling, the thought of Shawn’s being scared would have been enough to make him start. Shawn was scared because he knew that he hadn’t done it, that he hadn’t figured Nellie out. He was close, maybe, Billy thought. Maybe he’d gotten his engineers close enough so that Shawn could see the great, forgotten promise of Nellie. Maybe Shawn could even see how badly Eagle Logic fell short of what they’d been aiming for when they first camped out beside the hulking ruin of Eagle Mansion. But Shawn couldn’t get all the way there without Billy. Nellie was still a mirage for him. No matter how much those engineers at Eagle Technology pushed him forward, Nellie was still, always and forever, out of Shawn’s grasp. And he was scared, because he knew that to get there, he needed Billy.

  And that meant Billy had all the power.

  That had always scared Shawn, the idea of Billy having power over him.

  And here they were, lifting off the tarmac in Baltimore to head north to Cortaca and then farther north still, to the place where he’d given up twenty-three months of his life and then walked away with nothing.

  Other than Emily, he thought guiltily.

  To Eagle Mansion, thirty minutes past Whiskey Run, where Nellie—but not quite Nellie, because no, Billy thought, there was no way that Shawn had actually cracked it, or he wouldn’t have Billy here in this small-cock compensation of a jet—was waiting for him. And Shawn was scared, terrified!

  This was rich. After all their history—the cabin next to the dilapidated mansion, what happened with Takata and then Emily, the secrets, the lawsuits—after all of it, here they were, back to the same place they’d started, with Billy the only one who could solve a problem and Shawn trying to figure out how to control it. As the saying goes, Billy thought, history repeats itself.

  The attendants served breakfast with the orange juice. Fresh-made omelets they cooked in the galley up front, scones from a local bakery, fresh fruit, and yogurt so creamy that Billy didn’t realize it was yogurt and had to ask what it was. Everything came out on delicate, thin-rimmed china with heavy flatware. He could have been eating in a fancy hotel, or at Eagle Mansion back in the day, instead of at forty thousand feet.

  It wasn’t a long flight. Barely more than an hour. He read the newspaper on an Eagle Technology tablet that one of the flight attendants provided, and Shawn alternated between taking phone calls and furiously typing replies to e-mails.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve got to clear this shit off if we’re going to have the rest of the day free.”

  At one point, the copilot came back and told them they were about to fly over Cortaca.

  “They know to point it out to me,” Shawn said. “I always like to take a look.”

  To Billy, there was nothing to see. Trees and a town and a lake. Up there, on the hill, w
hat must have been the campus. Maybe he could make out the small football stadium, but maybe not. They were too high up for details. He was willing to believe that it was, indeed, Cortaca, that they were flying over Cortaca University, but they could have been flying over anywhere as far as he could tell.

  “It would have made a lot more sense for you to build this place near Cortaca,” Billy said.

  “I’ve had the same thought, but you’ll see,” Shawn said. “I couldn’t believe it myself when I started the project. Even when we were breaking ground, I’d tell myself every day it was ridiculous. But there’s something about Whiskey Run and Eagle Mansion that just has its claws in me. The whole time, though, even while I was thinking that it was crazy, I also knew it was the right thing to do. It was like the old building was calling to me. I had to do it. I mean, it’s not the old building anymore. It’s so different from when we were living out there. You’ll see. There are some things you just can’t walk away from.”

  Billy felt himself bristle at the words. You’ll see. Don’t worry, Billy. Shawn knows best. But then he thought for a second and wondered if Shawn’s paternalism was what bothered him, or was the idea of returning to Eagle Mansion worse? The idea that maybe that old nightmare wasn’t something he could walk away from either.

  The pilot banked the plane and started to descend. The thirty miles from Cortaca to Whiskey Run meant only a few minutes in Shawn’s plane.

  Off in the distance, far enough out that he wasn’t sure if he was imagining it, Billy thought he saw the glinting ribbon edge of the Saint Lawrence River, but mostly it was just woods. Here and there, as they cruised in, going from five hundred to four hundred to three hundred to two hundred miles an hour, Billy could see farm sites, the plowed land a violence of nakedness on the ground, and a snake of clear-cut woods where power lines stretched over a rise, but there wasn’t much out here. The thick four-lane highway turned into thin, twisting two-lane roads, and for miles and miles that was the only indication that humans had ever existed.