The Tea Party - A Novel of Horror (5 page)

Now, all the lights were on though it was only just past four—the maples’ persistent but noncooling shade made it feel as if it were considerably past sunset.

The front door was open in a vain attempt to vent the heat, and on the threshold stood a young man slight and tall, whose light brown hair had already retreated around a monk’s cap at the back of his skull. He wore pressed brown slacks, a pin-striped shirt folded open at the throat, and at the moment he was crushing a cigarette beneath his loafered heel. Then he turned from his survey of the empty street and put his hands in his pockets.

“Ollie, I have made a decision,” Bud Yardley announced to the woman he was going to marry in less than three weeks.

“Really,” she uttered, not bothering to look up. Bud was always making decisions; it was part of his charm.

“Yes, I have. After a great deal of careful consideration, I have decided that this weekend, and for this weekend only, we will do nothing but sell the original stuff from the Retirement Room, and none of this crap we have out here.”

Olivia West looked up from the cash register set on a four-foot long counter just inside the door, and she frowned. “What the hell are you talking about, Charles?”

Bud winced at the scolding and what he thought was an upper-class pronunciation of his given name, and decided that the marriage contract would somehow have to include a prohibition of its use.

“I mean it, Ollie,” he said earnestly. “Let’s do some real selling for a change.”

Ollie shrugged. “Whatever you say.”

“Well, it isn’t only what I say,” he told her, wondering at her attitude. She had been distracted all day, but wouldn’t tell him why. “You are the other half of this partnership, you know.”

A shallow crease appeared in her smooth high forehead as she counted the bills in their slots, lifted the tray, and counted the bills and checks beneath it. “Okay. Then I say you’re wrong.”

Bud bit down on the inside of his cheek. For a moment, just for a moment, he was tempted to take hold of the thick brown braid dangling down her back to her waist; just for a moment he wanted to give it a vicious yank to pull some sense into her skull. But he knew he wouldn’t, just as he knew she would never permit him to sell the only true antiques in the shop.

They had known each other for five years, since both were twenty-one and freshly scrubbed out of college. Both trained to be teachers, and while they had not found jobs, they found each other instead and a vast companionable interest in colonial American history—the social history that emphasized the way people lived. They were also equally fascinated by furniture—Bud made it in a small workshop in the basement, Ollie restored it, and it seemed only natural that they should open a place together.

They also discovered it didn’t hurt that they had fallen in love.

They pooled their money, cadged loans from each set of not-quite-approving parents, and set out to create a name to be reckoned with in the field of domestic antiquities.

The first attempt had been a disaster, down in South Jersey where the people were too interested in making a living in the present, and where the credible buyers seldom traveled in the numbers they needed to survive. The following year they traveled north, closer to New York City, where they hoped to attract a more well-heeled clientele. That project failed too when a blossoming of urban renewal literally brought their building down around their heads.

A fluke of driving that summer—Bud got lost, Ollie couldn’t read the map—landed them in Deerford, found them the empty house, and found them Eban Parrish, who took them under his wing. Their loan now long since repaid, they had become one of the regular stops for those looking for honest deals. And for those tireless wives who dragged their husbands out on weekends, and those pompous, all-knowing husbands who believed everything they read in books, there was the assorted furniture in the front—just enough real goods to keep suspicion at bay, the rest of it simply old and well kept and seldom worth half the asking price.

In the back, however, was a room filled with genuine stock insured for more than half a million dollars, and it was Bud’s constant dream to clear it out in a single afternoon, salt the resulting fortune away, and go off on a real buying trip, to Pennsylvania or New England.

The Retirement Room, their whole lives bound in carved wood and tufted velvets.

Ollie, however, kept reminding him that it had taken them almost five years and a lot of debts to build that much of a showroom. What would they do in the meantime, live on love and orange peels?

She looked up again and saw his disappointment, the way his lips were not quite twisted into a pout. She smiled but did not relent, instead skirted the counter and slipped her hand around his waist, two fingers insinuating themselves between the buttons of his shirt. She was only an inch shorter than his own six feet.

“You’re feeling guilty, that’s all.”

He took a deep breath and looked out the door. “I am not.”

“You hate it when some wicked city woman sashays in here and picks out a table she calls mid-Victorian that you knew damned well was made in Albany in 1931, and you don’t tell her she’s wrong.”

“Well, it’s cheating.”

“It’s giving the public what it wants.”

Their routine was simple: his earnest boyishness took care of the women, her somewhat earthy and frank sultriness usually lined up the men. They were also experts at picking out fellow experts, and never once had they tried to pass a bad deal on someone who could do them irreparable harm by dropping the wrong word.

If people wanted to be fools, on the other hand, they were more than willing to accommodate them—if the opportunity arose and the sucker asked for it with a smile.

“You wanna go upstairs?”

He was being consoled and he knew it, and he also sighed at the way her fingers scratched at his stomach.

“No. Someone might come.”

“It’s after four. No one’s coming now. C’mon, let’s go.” She tugged at him gently and leaned over to kiss his cheek, gently pressing her chest into his arm. “Huh? You wanna?”

He did. He always did. He could barely stand it when he hadn’t touched her for over five minutes, and was worse when he saw her with a male customer, playing her role, just out of reach. He felt his blood pressure rising when he saw a male friend give her a hug or kiss her or flirt openly with her. She loved the attention, and she loved him as well, and as far as he knew she had never been unfaithful.

But the other men drove him crazy.

She kissed his ear, and her tongue circled it once.

“Hey!” he said, jerking his head away. “Jesus, Ollie, someone could see you out there.”

She checked the road—no traffic, no pedestrians, Parrish’s office across the way was closed for the day.

“Besides,” he said glumly, “you told me you weren’t feeling well.”

“I never said anything of the sort. And my not feeling well,” she said, nuzzling his neck after a brief hesitation, “has nothing to do with what I have in mind. I may not be up to par, but I ain’t dying either. C’mon. Smoke a little, do a little. What about it, sailor?”

His arm found her shoulders, and he pulled her closer. “I love you, you know, even when you’re wanton.”

She grinned and relaxed; his pouting was over. “I love you, too. You wanna get married?”

“Never. I don’t want to spoil it.”

“Let’s go.”

She released him and threaded her way along the deliberately complicated system of aisles and passageways created for the shop’s layout. The stairs to their rooms above were off a short hallway in back, opposite the Retirement Room’s locked door. There was nothing in the hall but an overhead light, and seven fire extinguishers on the floor, and on the walls.

Ollie wriggled her hips once in a gentle parody of seduction, stopped at a polished milk can, and opened the first button of her shirt. A raised eyebrow, a silent whistle, and she laughed as she turned around.

“All right, all right,” he said, stepped inside and shut the door, turned the
Closed
sign outward and hurried in her wake. It was crazy the way she maneuvered him, and there were times when he wondered if it was unmanly. But at least she didn’t nag him. There was no pressure to make a million dollars before they were thirty, no pressure to fill their house with children, no pressure to do anything but pay the bills on time and continue learning their craft.

He reached the stairs and looked up to the landing. She was waiting, the shirt open and off her shoulders, her breasts not large but filling the transparent bra to give her what he thought was marvelously ample cleavage. She stuck out her tongue, slowly, reached into one cup and pulled out a breast, and he took the stairs two at a time, had his hands out to grab her when she whirled to the left and raced up the last three steps.

“You’re a pain, Olivia,” he said in disgust at her playing. “You’re a regular pain in—”

He stopped, frowned, sniffed.

“What?” she said.

He sniffed again. She saw him this time and did the same. And her eyes opened in fear.

“Bud? Oh god, Bud?”

He looked down fearfully, and gasped when he saw dark ribbons of smoke curling rapidly from under the Retirement Room door.

“Oh my
god!
Ollie, the extinguishers!”

“But the smoke alarm didn’t go off!”

He ignored her as he dashed back down and snatched an extinguisher from the wall. Then he took hold of the doorknob. It was warm, not yet hot, and he wondered what in god’s name was going on. No one had been in there since this morning, and the back window pane was over two inches thick—anyone breaking in would be heard all over town.

With his free hand he fumbled with the key chain clipped to his belt. “Come on, come
on, come on!”
The smoke wrapped around his loafers, snaked up his legs. He shook his head violently, then closed his eyes prayerfully when the bolt turned over. A deep breath to steady himself, but when he threw open the door he nearly dropped to his knees.

Smoke. Filling the room like a caged, pacing thunderhead, acrid and swirling, thick and blinding, shot through with flashes of flickering red and gold.

He choked, put one hand over his face and moved in, squinting to locate the source of the flames, hearing Ollie enter behind him and give voice to her shock.

“Help me!” he shouted. “Get this shit outta here!”

Ollie dropped the extinguisher she was holding and began pulling and yanking and dragging and kicking at everything within reach, piling it haphazardly in the hall and returning for more.

Tears blurred his vision, smoke drew bile into his mouth as he aimed the nozzle and played it over a Sheridan chair, an Empire headboard propped beside it against the wall. He could feel but not see Ollie scuttling around somewhere else in the room; he could see nothing but his arms and the pointing black cylinder in the smoke that filled his lungs, the flames that curled the hairs on his arms and scorched the hairs on the back of his neck. Sparks wafted out of the grey-black and landed on his wrist, landed on his cheek, and made him wince at the stabbing. He shook his head because he didn’t dare stop to brush them off.

Then he heard glass breaking, and the smoke began to move. Slowly, ponderously drifting toward the smashed window. The flames roared now, and he realized he had spent the extinguisher. He stumbled back back into the hall and grabbed another from the floor.

He swallowed and coughed, spat black phlegm onto the wall, and ducked his head to one side as he plunged in again.

“Ollie!”

The flames had moved to the far wall, and he attacked them at their base, adding cold smoke of his own to the already stifling room. His arms were stinging, and he was sure he could feel flames crawling up his back.

“Olivia!”

“Here!”

The smoke was thinning, and he could see her in the corner drenching a Revere cobbler’s bench and sobbing. When she was done, the extinguisher thunked to the floor and she staggered past him, shaking her head angrily when he reached out to grab her. A look around, and he realized they had beaten it. More noise and smoke than actual fire, and after ten minutes of poking numbly through the charred rubble, he threw his extinguisher through the broken window with a despairing yell, lashed out with his foot at whatever stood in his way, and fell into the hallway, gasping, coughing, ready to weep.

Ollie was on the stairs, her face in her hands. She parted her fingers, looked at him, and laughed.

Oh hell, she’s hysterical, he thought as he pushed himself to his feet; now she’s gone and gotten hysterical. He limped to sit beside her and hold her in his arms, comfort her, tell her everything was going to be all right, they could start over, don’t worry, no problem.

She giggled, and he was ready to slap her when she pointed to the open door.

“I know,” he said soothingly, stroking her hair, kissing her cheek. “It’s all right. I know.”

She shook her head and laughed again, pointed again, then grabbed his cheeks and forced his head around.

“Ollie, I can’t—holy shit!”

The room was clean.

The window facing him was unbroken.

When he examined the length of his arms he couldn’t find a single burn, or see a single ash.

TWO

1

There was no organization, official or otherwise, known as the Deerford Historical Society, nor was there a handful of old-timers who indulged in colorful oral history around a cracker barrel in the general store. As far as anyone knew, Deerford had been here before Sussex became a county, before New Jersey became a state, though after Winterrest had been built in its meadow. What people did know was that at one time it had been a coach stop, that it served as a place for buying staples for the area’s farmers, and when vacationers wanted to get away from it all, they passed through Deerford on their way to wherever “away” is.

There were very few corners, and its only traffic light blinked monotonously at the county road. All the houses—clapboard or brick, colonial or Victorian— were on or just off Deerford Road, set back behind elms and maples whose trunks were almost as wide as the porches. The children attended a regional school, the adults either had their own shops or they commuted to the county seat in Newton to work as clerks, secretaries and, once in a while, lawyers.