Firefly Rain (29 page)

Friday dawned ugly.

The skies were covered in clouds that had no business being there—thick thunderheads like you usually saw only in the afternoon heat. The air was heavy and sullen, and you could taste ozone with every breath. Rain was coming, but it was coming sulky. It would get here in its own good time, and the rest of the day was just going to have to suffer while it waited.

I stood on the porch, looking up at those gunmetal clouds and silently urging them to get on with it. The last thing I needed was Jenna getting delayed by the weather, or worse, trying to drive out here through a Carolina summer storm. Accidents had a way of happening during those, and that was under the best of circumstances. What I was facing now was anything but.

Inside, the house still simmered. The anger from last night
was still there, turned down but not gone away. I could feel it with a single step over the threshold. It got stronger as you went into the house, too, and the door to Mother and Father’s bedroom was almost hot to the touch.

If I’d had any doubts as to whether the house was haunted, and if so, who was doing the haunting, they were gone now. “Leave Adrienne out of this, Mother,” I said to the closed door, without bothering to try to open it. Nothing fell or crashed, but the heat didn’t go away, either. I guess she was thinking about it.

That meant I had things to think about, too, which was why I was out on the porch and looking away down to the Thicket. Last night’s revelation was still with me, sticking uncomfortably in my craw. Swallowing it was proving tough, which made me want to give it a chaser. And the more I thought about that, the more I realized there was only one thing I could do.

Call Carl.

Carl knew more than he was telling. Saying that was like saying that the sun came up in the east. But there was something else going on there, too. He’d been bending the last time we’d talked. Maybe I could get something else out of him, something that would help me make sense of what was going on.

Steeling myself against the pressure inside, I ducked back into the kitchen. After a gulp of cold coffee for courage, I called. The phone rang twice before Carl picked up, which is to say about two rings sooner than I was ready for him to.

“Yeah?” His voice was hard and suspicious, like he’d been waiting for the call and wasn’t happy to be getting it. “That you, Logan? Speak up.”

“It is, Carl.” I swallowed and pulled together as many of my thoughts as I could. “I need to talk to you.”

“Well, I don’t need to talk to you none. What happened, you eat all your damn food already?”

I felt my lips curling into a grin. Same old Carl, which in its own way was a comfort. If he’d gone soft on me, I would have worried. “No, Carl. I’m doing fine. I just wanted to talk. I wanted to say thank you, too, but mostly I just wanted to talk.”

“Thank you. Heh.” His laugh sounded like dry leaves. “Nice thing to say, especially when you’re trying to butter a man up. Don’t thank me, Logan. I’m just doing my duty.”

I crossed the kitchen and tucked the phone under my chin. “Your job ended when I came back, Carl. You’ve gone way above and beyond, even if I don’t understand why.”

He laughed again, without any joy in it. “That was a
job
, boy. I keep telling you that. Now why don’t you stop dancing round the subject and tell me why you want to bend my ear?”

I felt a small jab of anger twist me up inside, as much from surprise as from hurt. I guess I really had been trying to say thank you, once I’d thought on it, and Carl’s dismissing it made me feel low. “I really do want to say thank you, you know.”

He snorted. “If you did, you’d say it to my face, not when you’re hiding behind the phone and piling up questions to toss at me. Don’t play hurt, boy. It doesn’t become you. Just ask your questions straight and you might get an answer. You’d best hurry, though. I ain’t long on patience these days.”

My neck had a crick in it, so I switched the phone to my other ear. “Fine, if that’s how you want it,” I said, and I tried to phrase my questions in a way that would draw answers, not whip-crack derision. “Look, I think I’ve got some idea of what’s going on here. Maybe not with Hanratty or the car, but with the house, at least. I know you won’t talk about that promise, so I’m not going to ask. I think I know why you wanted to talk to me down in the
Thicket, though I’m not sure exactly how. But now all of a sudden things are getting mean here, and I don’t know why. There’s something wrong, and I want to make it right. How can I do that, Carl?”

There was almost silence on the end of the line, just slow breathing coming down the wire. “Boy,” Carl finally said, “I’m not sure.” More silence. “You remember what I told you down in the Thicket?”

“Yes?”

“You think on that real hard, son. Think on it the next time that pretty librarian smiles at you.” He paused, and I could feel the tension in him as he tried to figure out what he had to say. “And I got a question for you.”

That brought me up short. “For me?”

“Unless there’s another jackass named Logan on the line, I’d reckon so. Now think about this, ’cause you’ll only have one chance to answer it right. Get it wrong and, well, I wash my hands of you. I done my best.”

“No pressure, then,” I wisecracked. He didn’t laugh, not that I had expected him to. “Hit me.”

“Something’s gonna hit you, all right,” he said dryly. “Just answer this one for yourself. You don’t need to tell me nothing. Think about your father, and ask where his place was.”

It didn’t surprise me when Carl hung up without saying good-bye.

I sipped more cold coffee and thought about the question. The more I did, the less it made sense. When my grandparents had died, the house had passed to Mother and Father. It was theirs. The deed, I knew, had been in both their names. The house had a sense of being solidly
theirs
, Mother’s decoration over the base laid down by Grandfather Logan. No, it didn’t make any
sense. I put my coffee cup down on the table and steepled my hands under my chin. Whatever the hell Carl was talking about, it was too much for me, at least at this hour of the morning. I folded my hands and stared down at the tabletop. It really was damn ugly, now that I thought on it.

I blinked. That couldn’t be it, could it? Every piece of furniture in the place was either inherited or picked out by Mother, except the table. Surely that couldn’t have been what Carl meant. A quick look around the kitchen convinced me that the hunch wasn’t quite right. It was very much Mother’s room, really, and the more I thought on things, the more I realized that they all were. Her touch was all over, from the front room to kitchen counters to the setup of the mudroom in back. This was her house, top to bottom.

Or maybe not. Toy soldiers told me differently, and the notion hit me like a thunderbolt. The one place Mother never went, the one place Father kept as his own—that was the attic.

Without thinking, I rose up out of my chair and walked down the hall to the attic entrance. That white string dangled in front of me, flapping in some draft I couldn’t feel. It reminded me of the lure on one of those deep-sea fish that look like aliens, or monsters. Those things had always held an awful fascination for me. I’d had nightmares about them as a child, imagining giant ones lurking in the ponds and waterways near the house, waiting for me.

I still took the bait. Reaching up, I yanked the cord down. With a squeal, the trapdoor opened toward me. My left hand held it steady, and my right let go of the cord to pull the ladder down. It looked old but sturdy, the wood dark with age and never painted. The steps seemed strong enough to hold my weight—they’d held Father’s, after all—and so I trusted to luck and revelation, and I went on up.

It was smaller than I remembered, and the air was thick with dust. A naked bulb swung down from the ceiling, a chain hanging down from that, and that was all the light to be had up there. Two or three clicks were needed to get it going, and even once it lit up, it looked distinctly unwell. Hurrying seemed sensible.

A quick look around showed me boxes and dust. There were no footprints here, nothing that looked like a disturbance at all. Another time, I’d ponder that, wonder how whoever had gotten the soldiers down had done it without setting foot up there. That was for another time, though. I was hunting the scent Carl had given me.

Patchy insulation lined the ceiling in places. In others, you could see the nails from the roofing driven straight through. They stuck out like thorns on a briar, and I reminded myself not to bang my head. Doing so would be unpleasant.

Something tugged me toward the far end of the room, and I let the feeling pull me along. That was the spot that had always been forbidden, even after I’d been old enough to reach the cord. Father had kept his things here in a locked trunk, the pieces of his life that no one else had been allowed to see. I’d tried getting in once, thinking in my idiot teenager way that he’d been hiding dirty magazines, but the lock on the trunk had defeated me. Father had found out somehow, and that was about as angry as I’d ever seen him get. I’d never tried it again. Even when Father had died, I’d left it alone. It was, I suspected, what he would have wanted.

This time, the lock was off. The trunk sat there, massive and black, and waited for me to open it. So I did.

Inside were papers, neatly bundled and tied off with red ribbon. Clothes, folded and tucked into plastic bags to protect them. Toys, ones I’d never seen. A baseball glove and a beaten-up ball,
signed illegibly. Old pictures wrapped with rubber bands. And tucked in with the rest, a small book, bound in leather and tied around with a cord. A folded piece of paper poked out from one side. It was white and new, not yellowed like the rest that I saw.

This was what I was here for, I knew. Carefully, I pulled that book out, and closed the lid behind it. There’d be time later to go through those things, maybe getting to know Father a little better in the process. I found myself looking forward to the prospect.

Right now, though, I had something to read.

I moved back toward the light and sat myself cross-legged on the floor. Carefully, I untied the leather cord. The book fell open to display pages filled with Father’s handwriting. The paper, though, was marked with Carl’s.

Jacob
, it read, and I realized with a shock it was the first time I’d ever seen him use my proper name,
You’ll no doubt find this when the time is right. I don’t know what your circumstances are, or if you’ll ever come back to see this, but certain promises have been made that I believe will be fulfilled. Have a little faith, and read what your father has to say. Make of it what you will. The rest is up to you.

Below, it was signed in his hand, an economical collection of letters with as few curves as he could manage. I folded the note over twice, then tucked it in my shirt pocket. Then, sitting under that sickly bulb, I started to read.

Father’s book was not, much to my surprise, a day-by-day accounting of his doings. Instead, it was more of a journal, a collection of random writings. They dated from when he was fifteen or so to the years just before his death. The book itself was maybe an inch thick, made of heavy paper that was rough-cut on the edge. The cover was worn but sturdy, and the binding was stitched. This had been made by a man who wanted things to last, and owned by a man who took care of the things that were important to him. Even now, the leather of the cover was supple.

Not knowing what exactly I was looking for, I thumbed through the book. The earlier entries were in pencil, later ones in ink. There were essays in there, and bits of poems both original and quoted. There were song lyrics and a few sketches
that looked better than I would have guessed, including one of Grandfather Logan looking younger than I ever remembered seeing him.

Mostly, though, it was just observations on life and the things Father had seen. And so, lacking any better place to start, I turned back to the beginning and started reading.

He’d wanted to get away when he was young. That much I’d known. What I hadn’t known was that he’d done it.

The words he had for Grandfather Logan weren’t kind.
Cold
was one of them,
stern
was another. He had respect for his father, but not a lot of love that I could see, and he couldn’t wait to leave the house and the land.

I rubbed my eyes for a moment and winced. Some of the words Father used could have come out of my mouth, save one:
respect.
I never felt much respect for him, just confusion and anger. I could sense Mother’s growing frustration with him, and I made that my own. I couldn’t get away fast enough, and I couldn’t imagine a worse fate than being like him.

It seemed I was, though—or at least that I walked some of the same roads he did. College for him was Chapel Hill, not Boston a thousand miles away, but it was somewhere else and that was good enough. He went, and he took his own sweet time getting back while Grandmother and Grandfather Logan patiently waited. Those years were a blur of notes—a sketch of a street scene in Paris, some time in New York, mentions of women known and women lost. There was no mention of his work, though, or of Mother.