Here I Stay (21 page)

"No, thanks. Your girls are too young and pretty.
I want a middle-aged broad with absolutely no sex appeal."

"Can't say I blame you." Reba chuckled. "Linnie's gone back to high school, you know. Her daddy keeps her closer than the plaster on the wall."

Andrea felt an unaccustomed blush warm her cheeks. Mr. Hochstrasser wasn't a talking man, but she was willing to bet the story of her faux pas had gotten around town. She changed the subject. After Reba had described the prospects she had scouted, they agreed that a Mrs. Horner might work out.

"She's a little slow," Reba said. "But once you show her how to do something, she'll do it right— and go on doing it till you tell her to stop. Only other thing wrong with her is that she doesn't talk much."

That struck Andrea as a distinct asset. She said Mrs. Horner sounded just fine.

"I'd better be getting back," she said, rising.

"I'll drive you home," Reba said. "No sense bothering Jim."

"You mean you'd enter that house of evil, filled with a foul miasma?" Andrea asked jokingly.

Reba sank back into her chair with a squashy thud. "I wanted to talk to you about that. I couldn't get up the nerve."

"About Starflower, or the house?"

"The house. I don't want you to think I'm a stupid ass."

"I don't—"

"Sure you do. Anybody who believes in that psychic crap is a stupid ass. I don't believe it...but it happens to me."

Andrea sat down again. "What does it feel like?"

"Oh, it's easy to describe." Reba gave a brusque
bark of laughter. "Sick. I feel sick as a dog. My skin crawls, I get chills."

"But surely—"

"I've felt rotten other times, like with a flu? Sure. This is different. It isn't my insides acting up, it comes from outside—from some thing outside."

She made two words of "some thing," emphasizing the break; and the commonplace, almost imperceptible alteration sent a chill through Andrea.

"Do you see anything?" she asked.

"No. But I know it's there. Something wrong— not evil, nor malevolent, just.. .wrong. But that's why I run," Reba said simply. "I'm afraid that if I stick around I will see it."

"It's happened before, then?"

"Maybe half a dozen times. And in the damnedest places; one was a fancy hotel suite at the Mayflower, in the old days, when it was the classiest hotel in town. It was a political shindig, some congressman who was a customer of mine. That time it was a person, not a place, that set me off. I didn't even know the guy's name. Handsome, middle-aged man, with thick gray hair and a New England accent. He killed his wife, a couple of months later. Beat her to death with a shovel."

Reba raised her hand to wipe the perspiration from her broad forehead. More shaken than she cared to admit, Andrea said, "It must be terrible. I'm sorry; I didn't realize. Have you seen a doctor?"

"I figured you'd ask that," Reba said, with a humorless smile. "I saw three doctors. They all told me to lose fifty pounds and stop smoking."

"I suppose the reason other people don't react as you do is because you are more sensitive—"

"Goddamn it!" Reba brought her fist down on
the table. "I hate that word—it sounds like Ruby Starflower."

"I'm sorry—"

"I wasn't yelling at you. I'm not sensitive and I'm not psychic, and when I die—which will be in my prime, because I won't quit smoking or drinking or eating—they'll plant me in the Methodist cemetery and that will be it. I don't know what this is, or why it happens. After the first couple of times I stopped trying to understand, I just got my ass out of the place as fast as I could. Should have done the same at the inn. I was having a good time, and I hated to upset you."

"It's all right."

"Yeah." Reba took a long, shuddering breath. "I feel better. Thanks. We won't talk about it anymore. I don't like to talk about it."

"Could I ask just one question?"

"Shoot."

"You used to visit Cousin Bertha occasionally. Why didn't it happen then?"

"It wasn't there then," Reba said.

Andrea walked home, refusing Reba's reiterated offer of a ride on the grounds that she needed the exercise. What she really needed was time to think. Now she understood why Martin had been reluctant to repeat what Reba had told him. "You had to be there." Reba was a tough old woman and an admitted skeptic; for that very reason her impressions carried more conviction than the calculated
pronouncements of Starflower Morningcloud. Her sincerity could not be doubted. The world's finest actress could not have put on a performance like the one Andrea had just witnessed.

She left the houses of the town behind her and walked along the shoulder of the road, keeping an eye out for approaching traffic. What was it Martin had said? "I can't deny that reality just because I haven't experienced it myself." But that was just Martin's wishy-washy liberal refusal to take a positive stand on any issue. He would probably concede the small but finite possibility of actual flying saucers driven by actual green Martians.

If Reba's experience had been the only evidence of something strange, Andrea could have dismissed it as Scrooge dismissed Marley's ghost: "An undigested bit of beef, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato." There were other signs. Individually they were trivial, inconsequential; collectively they were hopelessly contradictory. Reba turned green with terror when she entered the house; Martin found it warm and welcoming. One guest heard the rustle of angels' wings; she herself cowered, frozen with fear, at a winged assault. And how could one possibly assess the relative weight of the various pieces of testimony? The claim of a Ruby Dowdy could be dismissed out of hand. Reba's story certainly had more validity—but how much?

Reaching her own driveway, Andrea stood studying the house with newly critical eyes. If I were Reba, she thought, I'd start seeing things. A shadowy figure on the widow's walk, leaning over the railing. A white, blind face at the window of an unoccupied room. Something—
something
—scuttling into concealment behind a tree, leaving a slimy trail of decomposition.

An architecturally minded guest had once used the phrase "wedding-cake Gothic" to describe the house. Rising tier on tier, floor upon floor, its white walls gleaming like spunsugar frosting, it looked almost good enough to eat. The carved swags and moldings were the decorations on the cake, the emerald green of the lawn the velvet cloth on which it was displayed. It was a beautiful old house, and the images it suggested were those of turn-of-the-century nostalgia—children playing on the lawn, attended by nurserymaids in white aprons and frilled caps, Mama rocking placidly on the veranda as she did her needlework, Papa standing on the steps surveying his domain with proprietary pride, thumbs in his vest pockets.

Perhaps, Andrea thought, it was impossible for her to be dispassionate. It was her house, her creation; she had made it what it was and she loved it with the uncritical affection any artist feels for the work of his hands and heart. Her strength and energy, her hopes and dreams had gone into it, they were part of the fabric. She was part of it. If her project failed, if she had to give it up—leaving would be like tearing up a vital part of herself.

She wouldn't fail. "Here I stay," she said aloud, with the solemnity of a vow; and it seemed to her that the house heard, and was glad.

The long walk home had done what Andrea hoped it would; it had helped her get things in perspective, and allowed her to shake off the dark fantasies Reba had planted in her mind. That was probably
Reba's trouble—too much food and drink, not enough exercise.

She was not tempted to discuss the matter with Martin. He had apparently broken through, or jumped over, his writer's block. He stayed in his room all day, not even emerging for lunch, and whenever Andrea passed his door she heard the rattle of his typewriter.

Jim had found a way around his block to—the physical limitations that might have prevented him from completing his remodeling. That afternoon a pickup truck stopped in front of the house. The driver, a bashful, towheaded youth, introduced himself as "Wayne—my dad owns the hardware store?" The rising inflection indicated a question to which Andrea could not think of an answer; but Jim, who had obviously been expecting him, appeared in time to rescue her. "Wayne's going to give me a hand," he explained.

"Yes, ma'am," said Wayne.

That was all he said to Andrea, but he was talkative enough after she had left them to themselves; she heard them laughing and chattering nonstop as they transported the things Wayne had brought upstairs. Some of the items—a power saw, pieces of scaffolding—roused the direst forebodings in Andrea, but she refrained, with some difficulty, from comment and admonition. If this was what Jim needed to keep him happy, he could have it.

Bright and early next morning Mrs. Horner made her appearance. Andrea's first reaction was not enthusiastic. Mrs. Horner waddled when she walked and refused to look Andrea in the eye. She was even less articulate than Wayne; the latter was capable of coherent speech, he simply chose not to exercise
that facility in Andrea's presence. But Mrs. Horner didn't speak three words during the first hour. In fact she only spoke one: "Morning." Her responses to direct questions were in dumb show—a nod for yes, a shake of the head for no, and a blank stare for everything else.

After pointing out the location of cleaning materials, Andrea retired, leaving Mrs. Horner at work in one of the upstairs bathrooms. She didn't care if Mrs. Horner ever said another word so long as the woman understood what was expected of her, and did it. Returning half an hour later to ascertain whether this goal had been achieved, she found that only half the bathroom had been cleaned, but that half shone with such dazzling purity that one might literally have eaten off the floor or out of the tub. Mrs. Horner had started at the wall and methodically cleaned everything in her way, including the cracks in the claws of the tub feet.

Andrea indulged in a little dance step as she ran downstairs to answer the telephone.

The caller was one of "my grandmas" as Andrea called them, wanting to know whether she and her husband could be accommodated over Thanksgiving.

"My daughter wants us to stay with them, of course," she explained, "and I suppose at Christmas we won't be able to get out of it, but I simply cannot face it more than once this year—you have no idea what it is like! I don't know which screams the louder, the cat when the baby pulls its tail or the baby when the cat scratches it—and the older ones play those noisy television games, all beeping and tooting and tweeting—and if one speaks to my son-in-law when a football game is in progress, he
snarls—literally snarls and snaps, my dear!"

Andrea did know what visits to the children were like, because Mrs. Green had told her about them at length. She liked the garrulous, cheerful old woman and her amiable husband, so she assured her that their usual room would be ready for them.

After she had hung up she sat tapping her pencil thoughtfully on the reservation calendar. Thanksgiving was less than two weeks away. The balmy, unseasonable Indian summer weather made it seem impossible that Christmas would soon be here.

She had been so busy trying to get her enterprise afloat and solvent that she hadn't made plans for the holidays. Perhaps she ought to close down. It would be wonderful to have some time alone with Jim; they hadn't spent a leisurely day together for months—not since the day before the accident.

Frowning, she studied the calendar. Thanksgiving was now a lost cause, but it probably would have been in any case. Hadn't Jim said something about Kevin joining them? It was a safe bet that he would. His parents were divorced and living at opposite ends of the country, but three thousand miles had not mitigated the loathing they felt for one another and the intense jealousy they shared concerning Kevin. He was damned if he went to one parent and damned if he went to the other; Andrea couldn't really blame him for taking the easy way out and avoiding both.

Kevin—and Martin, the omnipresent guest, the man who came to dinner. Obviously he wasn't married, but he must have some kin—brothers and sisters, cousins—to whom he could turn at the time of year when family ties were closest and warmest. Odd that she knew so little about him. He knew only
too much about the most intimate aspects of her life. But that was her own fault; she had succumbed to that insidious charm of his when she was tired and worried, yet she had never invited his confidences. She had never asked him about himself. She had never cared enough to ask.

Andrea made up her mind. No bookings for Christmas. She and Jim would have that day to themselves if she had to kill to get it. They would have a tree, and presents...She could get Jim something really nice this year, thanks to Martin's payments.

Martin—always Martin. Impulsively Andrea reached for the telephone, but before she lifted the instrument she reconsidered. Martin had a habit of pacing disconsolately up and, down the hall when he was at an impasse, and she certainly didn't want him to overhear her quizzing Reba about him. Maybe she could persuade him to go for a walk. That room of his must be a shambles, it hadn't been cleaned for...

Andrea leaped to her feet. She had forgotten Mrs. Horner.

"She'll go on doing what you told her to do until you tell her to stop," Reba had said. Mrs. Horner must have finished the bathroom by now; would she then go back to the beginning and clean it all over again, or would she remain in the same spot, scrubbing it in mindless repetition like a mechanical toy whose works have jammed?

Neither of the above. Mrs. Horner stood outside the bathroom door, bucket and brushes in hand, staring vacantly at the floor.