Mystery Dance: Three Novels (17 page)

“Who’s there?” she said. She wasn’t scared. Someone who had just lost a child, had lost two children, had already faced the worst. Ordinary fear no longer had any power over her.

A stifled giggle came from the shadows. Probably one of the neighborhood kids, responding to a dare.

Betcha won’t go over there, Scaredy Fraidy Baby. Betcha won’t touch the house where Mattie died. Especially in the dark.

Kids had their own way of dealing with tragedy. They poked dead things with sticks, resorted to morbid humor. They scared themselves silly on purpose. They went looking for ghosts.

Isn’t that what you’re doing?

No. Her ghosts had dissolved, slipped through her fingers as she watched, and all she had was a bottomless mirror.

Mattie had been so brave about Christine’s death. Part of it had been Mattie’s ignorance of death’s permanence. Christine was still so new to the world. Mattie hadn’t gotten the opportunity to form a sisterly bond. The closest she had come was taking her turn holding Christine, rocking her when she suffered colic, and singing “Hush Little Baby.”

And Mattie had, even more than Jacob, brought Renee through the foggy months of anguish. Mattie needed her. Not just for the everyday things like clean clothes and rides home from school, but for advice on what to do when Tommy Winegarden tried to kiss her on the playground. Or an explanation of how tadpoles could turn into frogs when they didn’t even have any legs. Or why Jesus loved the little children but let them smother in their blankies.

The giggle came again. It hadn’t been her imagination.

“Hello?” Renee called to the trees, wondering which of Mattie’s friends was hiding there. Sydney, Brett, or Noelle.

The only response was a snapping of twigs and the hushed rustle of branches.

She walked toward the noise, the marred mirror held before her like a talisman.

“Don’t be afraid. I just want to talk to you.”

Sydney Minter, two houses down, had come over one afternoon to play Barbies with Mattie. They both pretended dolls were really lame. Then Renee showed them how they could make a house of wooden blocks and have Barbie crash G.I. Joe’s jeep into it and, afterward, Mattie’s room grew loud with happy shouts and fantasized combat. Renee hadn’t seen the Minters at Mattie’s service.

She reached the cold fringe of the woods and tried once more. “Come out where I can see you. I miss her, too.”

The giggle came again, and this time it carried no wariness, no hesitancy. It was followed by a low, rasping reply from a counterfeit voice: “
Wish me
.”

The voice sounded electronic, as if coming from a toy. Mattie had owned a Barbie doll that allowed the owner to record bits of song so the doll could sing “like a real rock star.” This sentence carried that same compressed, static-filled quality, as if someone had whispered into the device at close range and then played it back on an amplified setting.

Who would play such a cruel joke? No child would be so vicious to a grieving mother. Nor as creative in cunning. Renee lifted the mirror as if to hurl it in the direction of the voice or deflect the unreal mirth. “What do you want?”

The reply came ten seconds later, from a different dark space behind the wall of trees. Again with the electronic stage voice of someone imitating a B-movie demon: “I saw what happened.”

“What happened where?”

A pause, time for record and playback. “The night of the fire.”

Renee fought her way among the sharp, grasping limbs of the landscaped bushes, ignoring the scratches to her skin. “Stay where you are,” she said, her breath and heartbeat filling her ears.

She plunged into the woods, a pine branch slapping her face and making her eyes water. The canopy of leaves overhead merged into a ceiling of utter blackness, and only a few jagged strips of distant light leaked between the tree trunks. She spun, confused, trying to orient herself toward the direction of the voice.

This time, it came from behind her, deeper in the forest. “He went through the door.”

“What door?”

Another five seconds for record and playback. “The door that swings both ways.” The source of the voice was retreating even as it spoke. Renee couldn’t tell if it was child or adult, male or female. She held her breath, crouching with her mouth open, gauging the location of the footfalls. As she listened, her mind raced in wild synchronicity with her pulse.

Door that swings both ways
.

Was it a riddle of some kind? Or was it all some elaborate prank played by the Minter kids or the Bennington boy or some faceless brat from one of the anonymous, perfect homes?

Or had someone seen something on the night of the fire and was afraid to tell?

She ran in the direction of the noise. The black trunks of trees seemed to rise up on all sides, as if they had been placed in a perfect disarray to confuse her. Low limbs slapped at her legs, ripping her slacks. The forest was like a live creature, drawing her into its wild heart. Renee clawed brittle twigs away from her face as her hair tangled in the arching branches. She tore free and lurched past a massive oak then found herself in a clearing.

In the starlight, she could make out a worn path. It led to a creek. The path disappeared into a thicket of briars, locust, and crabapple on the other side, a dense and bristling wall through which no human could pass.

Renee bent to the creek and splashed water on her cut face. She heard no footsteps, no false recorded voices, only the soft laughing of the water. She held up the mirror and saw herself, a wicked witch with bruised eyes, a viper’s nest of hair, blood trickling from the bridge of her nose.

She looked down at the water’s edge. Lying on a cold gray boulder was a tiny plastic object of faded yellow.

She stooped and picked it up, and it made a clacking sound.

A rattle.

It had belonged to Christine.

Beyond it, in the hollow between two water-worn stones, lay a bundle of fabric. Renee retrieved it, looked into the frozen smile of Rock Star Barbie. The doll should have burned along with the house. It was clean, its hair untangled, the glittering clothes laundry fresh.

She turned the doll over and felt for the button that would trigger the audio clip. She found it.

“
Housewarming present
.”

Renee sat by the creek for long minutes, listening to the wind in the trees, the bright music of the currents, the sharp chirrup of insects. As the last daylight faded and the sounds of the night merged into a single symphony, she stood, brushed the dirt from her clothes, and tucked the rattle and doll into her pocket.

Someone knew.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Jacob awoke with his mouth dry, heart pounding in his ears, wrists aching. He thought he smelled smoke and realized he’d been dreaming of the house burning down. His back was stiff. He rolled over and looked across the room. Joshua’s bed was empty.

The windowsill was gray with approaching dawn. He sat up and rolled his shoulders and neck, loosening the sore muscles. The smoke he’d smelled was from a cigarette. Joshua stood by the door, smiling, scratching in the stained armpit of his T-shirt.

“Morning, brother. How did you sleep?”

“Worse than ever.”

“You got no peace of mind. Them shrinks didn’t do you a bit of good.”

“How long do I have to stay here?”

Joshua flicked his cigarette, sending ashes onto the rug. “You act like I’m holding you here against your will.” He laughed, the barking of a thirsty dog. “I ain’t my brother’s keeper. Pretty funny, huh?”

“Can I go, then?”

“It’s a long walk back to town.”

“I’ll call a cab.”

“Sorry. I can’t let you use the phone. You might say something we’ll both regret.”

“Okay, then. I’ll walk.”

“So you don’t want to wait for your dear, sweet honeybunches of a wife.”

“Leave her out of this.”

“That ain’t the deal.”

Jacob looked at the closet. The door was closed. He wondered what was hidden behind it. “You have the house. And what I already paid you. Isn’t that enough?”

“What the hell good is this old place since I can’t sell it? Nothing but a snake den of memories that sneak out and bite you. You owe me plenty more, Jake. You’ve owed me for a long time. Now it’s time to pay up.”

“Whatever you want. Just leave us alone.”

“‘Us’? I thought you’d decided your wife was a cheating bitch who deserved to die.”

Jacob rubbed his eyes with the tops of his fists. “No. I didn’t say that. You said it, didn’t you?”

“Jake, how many times do I got to tell you? I’m only doing what’s best for you. I’m only doing what you would do, if you had the
cojones
.”

Jacob leaned forward, straining, and looked under the bed. Nothing. “You never took care of me.”

“Better than the old man ever did, that’s for sure.”

“Because he loved you the best.”

“Love? The old man? Them words don’t go together.”

“He did all of this for us, Josh. He wanted both of us to carry on for him.”

“Except I never wanted it. Not the fucking legacy, not the place in the community, not the life given in tireless service to others. I just wanted the money. But Dad fucked me over by leaving me the house instead. Laughed all the way to the goddamned grave, with you sitting there holding his bedpan and a fresh copy of the will.”

Jacob’s head throbbed and his tongue rasped against the roof of his mouth, the result of too much whiskey. He looked around the room. The only time he had ever desired ownership of this house was when the lawyer cracked open the will and announced that it belonged to Joshua. Maybe he should have bought it then. Surely the lawyer could have found a way around the covenant that prevented its sale.

The room seemed smaller and less forbidding than it had in their youth. Two baseball gloves hung on a row of pegs above the dresser. One was right-handed, one left-handed. Jacob had learned about transverse twins, and how the embryo split and the two halves developed as mirror opposites, facing each other, confronting each other. Jacob clenched his right hand. Joshua, as a lefty, had always been the better baseball player, especially as a pitcher.

That was one of the few ways their grade school teachers could ever tell them apart: by the hand with which they wrote. Occasionally Joshua would force Jacob to cover for him while he was off skipping school or smoking marijuana under the football stadium bleachers. Jacob had practiced writing with his left hand until the print was legible. He didn’t want to disappoint Joshua, and of course Joshua wielded the ultimate weapon against him.

Jacob had often imagined the two of them facing each other in the womb, fighting for Mom’s physical resources and sapping her strength. Then, at the moment of release, struggling toward the bright opening above in a desperate, winner-take-all race. As if they each knew the prizes that awaited and the stakes of life and death.

“Renee doesn’t know about you,” Jacob said.

“She knows enough.” Joshua went to the window.

Outside, the sun had risen but was veiled in ragged clouds. A spring breeze whistled through the shutters and a loose slat knocked against the exterior wall.
Tap tap tap
.

Mother had made that same sound walking down the hall after her stroke, tapping with her cane. Jacob could picture her hunched inside a peach flannel nightgown and wearing frayed slippers, ankles streaked with thick blue veins. Her body trembled as she slid a foot forward, balanced herself, swung the cane and planted its tip against the floor, adjusted her weight on the handle, and slid the second foot beside the first. Repeated over and over, slowly, until she reached the stairs. Then the tap of the cane would be broken by the clatter of her spidery hand against the railing.

“We had some good times in the old barn, didn’t we?” Joshua said, without turning.

“The chickens didn’t.”

“Heh. So you remember that, huh?”

Jacob grew faint and wanted to lean back on the bed but was afraid Joshua would take it as a sign of weakness. His lightheadedness was partially due to the hangover, but Joshua’s torture of the animals still had the power to shock him. The things Joshua did with a lit cigarette and that place where the guinea hens’ eggs came out…

He swallowed a hard knot of liquor nausea. “Daddy never did figure out why the hens quit laying.”

“The Gentleman Farmer. What a joke. He just wanted a big driveway so he could see his enemies coming from a long way off. That Wells paranoia runs deep, don’t it, brother?”

“You could have sent me a letter. I would have paid you and you wouldn’t have had to come back.”

“It’s more fun this way.” Joshua went to the closet, grinned, and opened the door. Jacob closed his eyes. The creak of the hinges hadn’t changed in two decades. The sound was still a dry scream combined with a perverted snicker.

“Wish me, Jake,” Joshua said, and they may as well have been eleven years old again. Wish Me started out as a game where one of them would guess which toy the other boy was holding in his bed across the dark room. Then Wish Me evolved into an elaborate fantasy in which they pretended to be someone else.

From Captain Kangaroo to Pete Rose to Batman to Shaggy on the “Scooby Doo” cartoon, they would run through the heroes of the day. Then Joshua started on monster movies, Dracula and the Mummy, using sinister voices that were as creepy as those of swarthy Hollywood actors. Instead of staying on his own bed, Joshua would sneak across the dark floor and slide under Jacob’s.

“Wish me a monster with fangs and red eyes,” Joshua would whisper in the darkness.

Jacob would barely be able to breathe and his vocal chords grew as tight as banjo strings. “I’m not afraid of you.”

“It’s not me you’re afraid of. It’s the Sock Monster.” And the sock would climb over the edge of the mattress, Joshua’s hand inside, scratching softly against the blankets. And no matter how many times Jacob told himself it was only a hand, the menace in Joshua’s voice made the Sock Monster a real and terrible threat. And Jacob would squirm away and bunch up near the headboard, only to find the Sock Monster crawling through the bed’s gap to snap and claw at his flesh.