A Summer with the Dead Page 11

  “Me neither,” Maya sipped her tea. “A prison cell is only eight by ten, isn’t it? That’s an awfully small space to spend the rest of one’s life, isn’t it?”

  “Tup … tup …” Elly muttered.

  “What? Elly?”

  “Tup.” Elly tilted to one side and Maya knelt and caught her before she hit the kitchen floor.

  The back door opened and Coty stepped inside with a surprised expression. “What’s going on?”

  “Call 911. Elly’s either fainted or had a stroke.”

  Coty drove. Aunt Elly sat propped up in the back seat of Maya’s car, strapped in, with her lolling head supported by a travel pillow. Maya sat beside her, holding her hand and uttering encouragement even though she doubted Elly heard her.

  The ambulance met them three miles away at the county highway and all of them headed toward the Olympic Memorial Hospital in Port Angeles. Maya and Coty followed the ambulance. Once there, Coty and Maya paced the waiting room for several hours before a doctor told them, “She’s stable, but we want to keep her overnight. Go home. I’ll phone when we know more.”

  Neither Maya nor Coty spoke during the first fifteen minutes of the drive home. The sky looked like it might rain. Coty broke the silence by clearing his throat.

  “I need to confess something,” he said.

  Maya glanced sideways. Coty clenched his jaw. She waited.

  “I’ve been investigating you.”

  “Me?” she said. “Well, find out anything interesting?”

  “I didn’t trust Elly’s memory of you. I did a records check. Criminal history. Arrest records. You’re squeaky clean. Your record is so clean it’s … boring.”

  Maya leaned forward, frowning. Coty changed his grip on the wheel and continued. “I checked you out because I didn’t know you from Adam, and Elly’s judgment is questionable at best, especially lately.”

  “Questionable is a good word. Elly trusted a complete stranger just because he offered to fix her rotten porch.”

  “My point exactly.”

  “And I’m supposed to trust you?” Maya asked. “I don’t know you from Adam either.”

  “But do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Trust me.”

  “Not so sure. Especially now.”

  Coty dug in his jacket pocket and pulled out a laminated card. He handed it to her.

  She studied the card. “You’re a private investigator?”

  “Licensed and bonded.”

  “This card doesn’t prove anything. Anybody could have this printed up.”

  “True.” Coty grinned. “You can have me checked out if you like.”

  “Can you recommend a good private investigator for that?”

  Coty smiled. “Several.”

  “Why are you at Elly’s?” Maya asked. “Why did you come here?”

  “It’s a sad story and it might take some time to tell.”

  “We’re an hour away from home. Is that enough time?”

  Coty drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, back and forth like chords on piano keys. “My nephew, Danny, is missing. He had a big argument with his parents … my sister and brother-in-law. Typical stuff for a seventeen year old but they didn’t think he’d pack his things and leave during the night. It’s been four months and not a single phone call to let them know he’s okay. My sister isn’t sleeping. Not eating. She’s living on sedatives.”

  Aren’t we all?

  “I tracked Danny to Port Angeles. Some street kids there recognized his photo. He hung out with them for a while and he had a part-time job cleaning a Texaco garage. Minimum wage—a place to sleep and wash up. The manager told me Danny was a reliable worker. He was never late and as honest as anyone he’s ever hired.”

  Coty’s voice cracked. He stared straight ahead, clenching his jaw again. “And by the way, my name isn’t Coty. It’s Wayne C. Matheson. You didn’t notice that, on the card?”

  “No, I just looked at the photograph.” Maya lifted the card again and read the name. She twisted as far as the seatbelt allowed, leaning forward, eyeing his profile. “After calling you Coty for a whole month, I’m supposed to start calling you Wayne?”

  “Elly was so convinced I was this guy named Coty, I just let her think it. Sometimes she’d call me Coty and I wouldn’t answer; my mind already on something else. She must have thought I was rude.”

  “No, Aunt Elly thought you were either weak minded or hard of hearing.”

  “That goes along with my cover, I guess.”

  “You do realize, don’t you? I can’t call you Wayne, at least not when Elly is around.”

  “That’s right. Just keep calling me Coty.”

  In silence, Maya stared out the passenger window for several minutes. She spotted a woman beside a rural mailbox who reminded her of her mother, and seeing the woman, reminded Maya she owed her mother a phone call. People often told her she resembled her mother. It was meant as a compliment, because Jennifer Pederson was a fine looking woman.

  Will I look like Mama when I’m sixty? Or that creature on her front porch, wearing her clothes?

  “You’re awfully quiet all of a sudden. What are you thinking about?” Coty asked.

  “I’m thinking about being boring.”

  “I never said you were boring. I said your record is. You’re not boring … at all.”

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  MAYA HEATED A CAN of chili and she and Coty shared it along with leftover cornbread. It was ten-thirty P.M., the full moon lit up the driveway almost as bright as a hazy afternoon. Maya felt exhausted as she filled the sink with hot water and slid the dishes down through the bubbles.

  Coty said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d keep my profession a secret, at least for a while longer. It makes my job easier if people think I’m an itinerant handyman. People stop talking to me if they discover I’m a private investigator.”

  “So I’m not a suspect anymore?” Maya asked.

  Coty smiled. “Are you hiding something?”

  “No. I couldn’t kill anyone, not even if I thought they were a threat,” Maya said, picturing Benson when he tried to strangle her. She washed and rinsed two butter knives and held them above the drain rack, trying to imagine driving them deep enough into someone’s chest to hit something vital. She nestled them into the drainer, turned, and leaned against the counter with a sigh.

  “Sure you could. We all can, under the right circumstances.” Coty pushed his chair back. “You’re probably exhausted after a day like this, so I’ll head on out to the bunkhouse. Get some rest. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.” He let himself out and strode across the driveway.

  Maya washed the chili pot, the bowls, bread plates and two spoons, and added them to the butter knives in the rack. Nine items, an uneven number. She took a glass from the cupboard and washed it, setting it beside the pot in the rack. Ten items. An even number. A safe number. A part of the ritual. Part of the ceremony.

  “No. I don’t do this anymore.” She dried the clean glass and returned it to the cupboard. “It’s time to fight the obsession. Time for the rituals to end.”

  She checked the lock on the back door and hesitated for a long second. “Walk away,” she told herself. “You don’t need to recheck it—a lock you just locked.” She stepped back. Then forward again.

  But can I climb the stairs and fall asleep without the lock ritual? She checked the lock on the basement door, sensing something wrong, and it wasn’t because she was breaking the compulsive ritual. The hairs on the back of her neck rose. Her ears tingled. She shivered as a cold draft blew a dust ball from under the basement door. The dust ball trapped itself against the toe of one sock.

  Maya turned the black enamel doorknob both directions, pulling hard. Testing was the only way to know for sure. The ritual. The ceremony. The doorknob felt freezing cold in her palm. Something was wrong. She withdrew her hand and glared at the black doorknob. She shuddered as the doorknob turned agai
n, on its own—all the way to the left, all the way to the right. Something leaned hard against the door from the other side. The ancient wood groaned. The hinges strained. Someone stood on the basement’s top step, inches away, putting his full weight against the door.

  “Coty?” Maya pressed her ear against the door. The draft grew stronger, gusting through the half-inch gap at her feet. The door was so cold it made her cheekbone ache. She stepped back as the door’s surface frosted over. The black doorknob grew a coating of ice.

  “Who’s there?” Maya asked.

  “Open the door.” It was a baritone voice—not Coty’s. “Do you want your watch?”

  My watch? Her voice quivered when Maya said, “Leave it on the steps. I’ll get it in the morning.”

  Maya heard a sharp snap of old wood and the basement step groaned again. The draft reversed and sucked the dust ball back under the door. The ice crystals on the doorknob melted and dripped on the linoleum at her feet. A thin piece of ice slid down the face of the door. She ran to the kitchen window above the sink and parted the curtains. Coty’s windows glowed with cheerful light. His shadow crossed from one bunkhouse curtain to another. He could not have run the length of the basement, out the back door, up across the driveway to the bunkhouse in such a short time. It wasn’t Coty that made the basement steps groan. It wasn’t Coty’s voice demanding she open the door.

  Maya stared at the yellow basement door for several minutes, her heart hammering against her ribs. With shaking hands she stoked the woodstove with a madrona log, the largest she could find in the woodbox. It was a dry, seasoned log. It would last until the wee hours. She inched the damper down. The log would burn slow and hot and leave a nice bed of coals for morning. It would keep the night chill away. What else would the flickering flame keep away?

  Maya didn’t like the thought of sleeping alone upstairs at the far end of the hallway. She filled the tea kettle and slid it across the surface of the wood stove. The wet bottom of the kettle sizzled on the hot surface. She would make a mug of instant cocoa before heading upstairs; a large, boiling mug of cocoa. It had never occurred to her she might spend a night or two alone here. Never once had she considered that.

  Coty was thirty feet away, across the driveway, but calling to him meant unlocking the kitchen door. It meant opening it and stepping outside, alone. In the dark. Maya parted the curtains above the sink again, hoping to see Coty’s silhouette. That would be reassuring, to know he’d hear her if she yelled, but now Coty’s windows were dark. He was probably already asleep. He looked tired when he left. She wished she had thought to ask for his cell number.

  The kettle hummed as it reached a low simmer, but Maya wanted it boiling hot. She hurried down the pantry hallway, through the skylight room and into the living room. Elly said the front door was always locked. No one exited or entered through that door in a decade, Elly said. The door led to a big outside porch and wide steps that dropped into an overgrown garden, a garden that sloped downhill toward pastures and a stream. Maya’d seen wild grass clogging the cracked walkway and moss bulging over the path’s edges. Giant, lanky, rhododendrons touched tips from opposite sides of the path. She’d explored it not long ago. It was a jungle. An abandoned, overgrown garden. A neglected place.

  Maya gasped at the sight of the safety chain hanging straight down. She rushed forward, grabbed the dead bolt and raked it downward, skinning her knuckles. She heard the sound of the bolt slamming in the mechanism. She turned the doorknob, pulled, and then pulled harder. It was locked tight. Her knees trembled. She fastened the chain. She wanted to test the lock again, but stepped away. Who had unlocked it, and when?

  Now, all three doors were locked, the only entries according to Elly, but Maya suspected there was at least one other way in, somewhere. This was a big house and there were rooms she had never entered. There was the door at the end of the upstairs hall, two feet away from her bedroom door, a door that led to a steep flight of stairs with no railing. According to Elly. Sometimes Elly made sense and sometimes she didn’t, and sometimes she became Mr. Elly. Who was Mr. Elly?

  “Mr. Elly is—Harlan,” Maya knew it was true the instant she said it. When under stress, Elly became Harlan. “She can’t stand Harlan being dead. She can’t let him go, so she brings him back the only way she can. She knows him so well, she can be him.”

  Tears stung Maya’s eyes. Her aunt had been alone here for too long. Being alone the past five years had done something to Elly’s mind. Twisted it. Warped it. And if Maya lived here alone, it would happen to her, too.

  “But, I’m not going to stay here.”

  Maya returned to the kitchen. She spooned cocoa powder into a large mug and added boiling water, glancing at the basement door again. No frost. No ice. A couple small puddles on the linoleum was all. She turned off the light and headed upstairs. At the landing, something caught her eye. Something glimmered in the shadows. Her gold watch lay at the base of the sixth step, coated with dust as if no one had touched it in the four weeks it had been missing. Someone had to have put it there. Someone had to have touched it to leave it on the steps. How could they touch it without disturbing the dust?

  Maya picked up her watch. It felt icy cold in her hand. The dust smudged her palm like damp ash.

  Leave it on the steps…I’ll get it in the morning. Her very own words.

  She rubbed the watch against her sleeve as she climbed the stairs. Near the top, the green boy floated. She’d never seen his feet before. He wore baggy shorts down to the knees and below that, at the base of his gossamer legs, he wore Nike high-tops.

  “Help me,” he whispered. “Please.” He floated back and dissolved into the wall behind him.

  How long, Maya thought, had he been trapped in this house waiting for someone, anyone, to see him? To hear him calling out? How long? Decades? Is he even real? Or is it my sick imagination?

  Twenty years ago kids didn’t dress like that. They didn’t have tattoos or nose rings. They didn’t wear baggy, satin shorts and Nike high-tops twenty years ago.

  Maya shivered as she undressed and dropped her clothes into the bathroom hamper. She bathed as fast as she could in three inches of hot water, dried off, grabbed her watch, and returned to the hallway wrapped in her towel. The door at the far end swung open without a sound. Maya’s damp, bare feet squeaked to a stop on the hardwood floor.

  The green boy appeared. He struggled against an invisible force and then his green glow was swallowed again by the black air of the stairwell. The door swung around and closed behind him and Maya ran into her room and locked the door behind her. She climbed into her pajamas. Trembling, she refastened her watch around her wrist. From now on she would only take it off when she bathed. She snapped the watch’s safety chain. It would not get lost again. Somehow, having her watch on her wrist made her feel in control, as if she’d reclaimed a small part of her life, the strong part, the part before she ever saw a green boy or heard voices from behind ice-coated doors. Knowing the correct time put her in control of her schedule. Keeping to a schedule meant she was lucid. Cogent. Logical. Logical meant she was rational and that was the same as sane. It all started with the watch.

  With her closet door ajar and its interior light painting a golden wedge across the hardwood floor, Maya raised her window shade all the way up. Moonlight reflected off the cedar shake roof outside. This was the third night in a row without rain. She propped herself up in bed and pulled the covers up to her collar bone.

  Maya sipped her cocoa and felt the shivers subside. None of this is real. None of it. There’d been no voice at the yellow basement door. There’d been no frost on its painted surface, no ice on the doorknob. No puddles on the floor. She was imagining things again, that’s all. Dr. Conover warned her about this. While under stress relapses were common. Just because she’d left her abusive husband and her dead-end life behind, it didn’t mean all the symptoms would vanish overnight. Recovery was a slow process, a difficult process. It would take time to heal.
It would take time to turn off the images and the voices. Time to leave the little ceremonies behind. She would put forth more effort, and she would win this fight.

  “Give me a call, Maya,” Dr. Conover had said. “I’m here for you.” But Dr. Conover’s office was in Tacoma, a three-hour drive away. She would phone Dr. Conover tomorrow, not so late at night. Tomorrow. That was soon enough.

  Maya lifted the lace curtain. “No ring around the moon,” she whispered. “No rain tomorrow.”

  Even though she felt weary and tired, it was after two A.M. before she dozed, and when she awoke in the morning, she recalled no dream. Without dreams, sleep was never satisfying. There seemed to be no passing of time without dreams.

  Through her window the tops of the Douglas fir trees were tipped with golden morning light. She lifted her wrist to check the time, but her wrist was bare. Her watch was gone.

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTEEN

  “THOUGHT YOU’D WANT TO know, I’ll probably release your aunt tomorrow,” Dr. Framish’s voice sounded nasal over the phone, “I’ll let you know early tomorrow morning. She’s doing well, though. We want to run a few more tests because, apparently, your aunt hasn’t visited a doctor since she was a child.”

  Maya changed the sheets on Elly’s bed and vacuumed and dusted her aunt’s room. Aunt Elly was recovering quickly.

  Elly’s closet door stood wide open. Maya stuck her head inside. The oval rug, the hamper and a tiny pair of pink satin slippers were the only things on the closet floor. Elly’s clothes hung on a single rod down the left side of the closet. A shoe organizer with eight slots hung closest to the door. Four of the slots were empty. Maya slid one pair of shoes out. Size four. They looked like children’s shoes they were so small.

  Elly’s wardrobe totaled two flowered nylon dresses and three pair of slacks—blue, black, and brown; and three blouses in white, blue, and pink. “That’s everything?”

  At the far end of the closet stood a tallboy dresser. On top of the dresser sat a miniature lamp with a mica shade. Beside the lamp was a satin envelope holding a pair of knee-high stockings. The stockings were folded flat and looked unworn.