A Summer with the Dead Read online

  “I hiked up to the old barn and got the little backhoe. I dug a deep trench under the burned-down chicken coop and rolled Bossy and Morris into that trench. I covered ‘em up and packed the dirt down and cleared away all the charred wood. The following spring, Harlan and I built the new wood shed over it all. That’s the same one that’s still there today.”

  “What did Harlan say about the dead animals and the chicken coop burning down?”

  “I told him vandals did it in the middle of the night. He said, ‘bastards’.”

  “Why didn’t you bury Angel in the ditch, along with Bossy and Morris? Wouldn’t it have been easier?”

  “Yeah, but they were good animals. Practically pets. Morris loved to have his nose rubbed, and Bossy would close her eyes and let me pick seeds and grass out of the little hollow behind her horns. They deserved a clean grave of their own,” Elly said. “Not a place contaminated by Angel’s filth. And you know, the strangest thing happened a few days after that. I spotted three hens running loose in the pasture. I guess they got out before the flames got’em. Every once in a while I still see a hen with her chicks out there. They must’ve found themselves a rooster if they laid fertile eggs. Maybe it’s Schaff’s rooster. I never kept roosters myself. They eat up the grain and start crowing too early in the morning. I had a beautiful rooster once, though. I called him Glamour Boy, but one day he lowered his head and stretched out his wings and ran at me, so I wrung his neck. Harlan and I had chicken and dumplings, and soup made from his skin and bones.

  “I don’t know why I decided to bury Angel in the basement. I should’ve buried him out there in the open field somewhere in a deep, deep grave and a whole bag of lime. He doesn’t belong down there, with those other people. Especially that poor woman who struggled to live for so many hours before she finally quit breathing.”

  While you took a nap with Harlan.

  “I guess I was just tired. Tired of blood and bodies and digging holes. Tired of deciding what to do and when to do it. It’s not an easy business, Maya.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  A TEENAGE BOY AT THE Red Apple loaded their sacks of groceries into the back of the Edge and closed the hatch.

  “Thank you, Fredric.” Elly handed the boy a five-dollar bill. He jammed it into his jeans pocket with a quick glance at the front of the store. He smiled and jogged away pushing the cart.

  “The store doesn’t allow tipping,” Elly said. “But he’s delivered groceries to the farm before in the pouring down rain. He deserves a good tip.”

  Maya climbed behind the wheel of the Edge and started the engine. “Let’s stop for a donut at the bakery.”

  “Oh yes, let’s do that,” Elly said. “That sounds wonderful.”

  There was a vacant parking spot right outside the front door of Louisa’s Bakery. Inside, Maya and Elly sat down at the same table where Maya sat with Hal Neil a week earlier.

  “Welcome, ladies,” the baker said.

  “Two maple bars and two coffees please,” Maya said. “With cream.”

  “Gotcha,” Bill said.

  A moment later, the door to the restroom opened and Hal Neil exited, wiping his hands on a paper towel. He looked up and met Maya’s gaze. “Hey, Maya. Good to see you again.”

  “Hal, this is Elly Pederson, my aunt. Elly, this is Hal Neil, the writer I told you about.”

  “Hello,” Elly glanced up and then out the window. “Maya, I have a headache. Let’s get our donuts to go, if you don’t mind.”

  “I’ll handle it,” Hal said. “Bill, their order is to go, please.”

  Bill bagged up the two maple bars and poured the coffee into tall paper cups with lids. Hal brought them to the table.

  “It’s on me,” Hal said.

  “Thanks, Hal.” Maya led Elly outside and into the Edge. “Do you feel okay, Elly?”

  “I just want to go home.”

  “Does this have something to do with Hal?”

  “How well do you know him, Maya?”

  “I don’t really know him at all. We just talked once at the bookstore and once at the bakery. Why?”

  Elly shook her head. “I think he’s from Chicago.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Just a feeling.”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t be inviting him to the farm.”

  “Don’t drink the coffee or eat the donut, Maya.”

  “But …”

  “I’m serious. If he is from Chicago, he’s looking for me. And now he’s found me.”

  At the farm, Maya dumped the coffee down the kitchen sink and threw the maple bars to the crows. Four hours later the crows were still circling the house, begging for more.

  “Looks like the maple bars weren’t poison, Elly. The crows are alive and well.”

  “Better safe than sorry,” Elly said.

  Maya spotted Coty through the kitchen window. He sat on the gate to the upper pasture, the toes of his western boots jammed behind the lower rail. He looked up and smiled as she exited the back door and headed toward him. Sunlight glinted off his dark bronze hair.

  “I introduced Hal to Elly at the bakery today and she’s convinced he’s from Chicago.

  Apparently there are people in Chicago who want Elly’s head on stick.”

  “Let’s have coffee in the bunkhouse,” Coty said. “I need something more than chammomile tea for conversations like this.”

  Inside Coty’s quarters everything was tidy. Instead of a twisted wad of bedding, the blankets and the pillow were smooth and straight. Across the room dishes had been stacked to drain beside the sink. He pushed the curtains open and sunlight flooded the room.

  “I have two percent, but no cream,” he said.

  “Milk is fine.”

  “Tell me about the people in Chicago.”

  “I’ll start at the beginning,” Maya said. “We have some serious catching up to do.”

  “Anything about Danny?”

  Maya shook her head. “For some reason, Elly is dragging her feet on that.”

  Coty set two mugs on the counter and the coffee pot on a glowing burner. He opened the door of the little refrigerator and poured milk into one of the mugs. “Sorry, I don’t have tea.”

  “I only drink tea with Elly because Harlan doesn’t like the smell of coffee.”

  Coty shook his head. They sat down at the little table by the front windows.

  “This is where you were sitting the day I drove up, wasn’t it?” Maya said. “I saw this curtain move and suspected someone was watching me.”

  “You made a great first impression.”

  “I tried to convince myself that you looked mean and scary.”

  Coty grinned. “That takes practice, you know.”

  The coffee pot hummed on the burner and steam gusted from the spout. The first leap of amber liquid chugged into the glass dome and the aroma filled the small room. Coty hurried over to slide the pot to one side of the burner to allow it to perk gently. He picked up dishes from the draining rack and stowed them in a cupboard behind a striped curtain. He draped the towel on a wire rack above the sink and then returned to the table.

  “Coffee takes about five minutes,” he said. “Go ahead. I’m curious to hear this story.”

  “It’s Elly’s story, and it’s a long one. She grew up in the Chicago suburbs. Her mother died when she was eight. Her father was a mechanic, a very good one apparently, and he taught Elly a lot about engine repair,” Maya said. “Elly’s little brother, Stephen, was my father.”

  Maya told him about Elly driving a truck for Felix. She said the deliveries were often stolen goods. She didn’t mention the bodies. She talked about Angel and how everyone was afraid of him, about Angel raping Elly, and about how he showed up at the farm one day and how Elly cut his throat and buried him under the house. Even though she kept some details secret, it took over an hour to tell Coty the story.

  Later that afternoon, Maya returned from a walk and found Elly
asleep on the living room floor where the sofa used to be. Elly was curled up beneath the patchwork quilt with one of her bed pillows under her head. Her eyes flickered open. “Maya?”

  “What are you doing on the floor?”

  “I’ve always napped here,” Elly said. She closed her eyes again and was snoring in seconds.

  Maya climbed the stairs, feeling guilty for revealing some of Elly’s secrets to Coty. But he needs to know. He has a right to know. And I needed to tell it to him while I still remember it. She would tell him the rest of the story later. It was all written down in the back of her medication journal.

  Maya expected to see Danny hovering in the upstairs hallway, but he was elsewhere this afternoon. The upstairs landing was aglow with violet-blue sunlight through the morning glory window.

  Maya halted in Elly’s bedroom doorway. The closet door stood wide open. Maya glanced behind her, down the stairs. She listened, heard nothing, tiptoed across Elly’s room and flipped on the closet light. Overhead were tiny hairlines in the ceiling. The lines formed a four-foot square. She had missed seeing that before. A nylon cord stretched from a small hole in the square to a hook by the door, and from the hook the cord dangled straight down. Maya pulled the cord. A trapdoor swung downward. Stairs unfolded with almost no sound. She climbed the stairs into the attic. Maya felt her way around until she stubbed her toe on the leg of a chair. In front of the chair was a table and above the table she found a light cord. She pulled the cord and a single, hanging bulb glowed.

  The attic ceiling was low and the room was L-shaped and long. It started above Elly’s closet and continued around a corner to the opposite end the house, somewhere above Maya’s room. Beside the table and chairs were cupboards and an open door leading to a toilet and laundry sink. Around the corner were four, twin iron beds, the headboards against the dormer wall. They looked like old hospital beds from the late thirties or early forties, painted white. Striped mattresses covered the sagging springs. Thick black canvas had been nailed over the three dormer windows and carpet runners formed paths between the beds and along the inside wall. Beyond the beds lay empty space and at the far end of the room stood a single door. Maya strode the length of the room and opened the door. She stared into charcoal gloom. Stairs descended through a narrow gap between trusses, and then between unfinished walls further down. She searched but found no light switch. It’s the escape route to the tunnel … but it’s also a way into the house from under the house. She closed the door. There was no lock.

  Maya backed away from the door. No lock.

  Anyone in the basement could enter and climb those stairs. They could enter the attic. From the attic they could drop the folding stairs and climb down into Elly’s closet and from there they could find the hallway, and down the hallway to Maya’s bedroom at the far end.

  At least my door has a lock.

  “Stop it,” Maya whispered. “Don’t do this to yourself. Dr. Conover said not to feed your paranoia … so, just stop it.”

  Maya wanted to run from the attic. She wanted to return to the lower floors. Instead, she returned to the table, pulled out a chair and sat down.

  She studied the stark room, imagining the people stashed here years ago. She pictured them tiptoeing and whispering, afraid to make any sound, afraid to ask for food or water. She pictured them trying to trust the strangers in the house below. Elly and Harlan. Harlan!

  “It would have been impossible,” Maya whispered, “to trust Harlan.”

  Were any of those people Harlan hid up here, still alive? Had anyone really survived up here, long enough to escape from the law? Or was Elly’s memory faulty? Was that simply how Elly preferred to remember things? It was impossible to decide. Elly admitted having trouble distinguishing between real and imagined. It runs in the family.

  Maya slid the chair back beneath the table before descending the stairs into Elly’s closet. She crossed the upstairs hall and entered the bathroom. Inside one of the lower drawers she found one of the new flashlights. She carried it back to Elly’s closet and retraced the route into the attic and through the long, L-shaped room to the door at the far end. She opened the door and smelled the gloom again. It was musty and silent in that stairwell. Maya flicked the flashlight on and descended, feeling her way along a cold wall.

  The stairs were as steep as a ladder, each step barely wide enough for her foot. The stairwell narrowed as she descended. There was no railing and soon there was no wall, nothing but a straight drop on either side into a black air. Finally, she stood on the last step, a foot above a dirt floor. All around her was dirt, the walls were dirt, even part of the ceiling was dirt. The tunnel led off to her left. Elly said the tunnel crossed beneath the driveway and the bunkhouse and continued deep beneath the hillside. The walls were scarred with shovel marks, grooves from pick axes and pry bars. Maya pictured the Mexican men, sweating, digging, carting the rock and soil outside to the fields and gardens, returning to dig more. Had they been paid or had they been thrown to the bottom of the well and left there to die? Had it been one of the Mexican men’s spirit who crawled through the tunnel that day, following her, calling to her? What would he have done, had he caught up to her?

  Elly said they didn’t speak English. But was the story true at all?

  To Maya’s right sat a dozen concrete blocks, the blocks Elly said concealed entrance to the basement beside the furnace. Maya aimed her flashlight left again, into the gaping tunnel. The bright beam penetrated a short distance and then lost its strength, as if hitting black velvet. Overhead, wood beams supported the tunnel every ten feet or so, like crooked arms. The dank smell of the tunnel reminded her of her crawl through the hillside. She shuddered, remembering the crawler’s voice behind her, “Don’t leave me here.” She remembered the skeletal hand reaching for her, the dull gray cranium with its empty eyes and the scratching sounds it made as it followed her. Coatl?

  Maya took the stairs two at a time toward the attic, toward the open door at the top. It was a long, straight climb from the basement to the attic. She arrived breathless, closed the door and descended the folding stairs into Elly’s closet. She paused in the bedroom doorway and listened for sounds of activity downstairs. With relief, she heard Elly snoring.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THE NEW CLOCK NUMBERS glowed in the dark. It seemed Maya woke every morning now at 2:22 AM.

  “Who are you?” The voice came from the hallway.

  “Danny?” Maya turned on her bedside lamp. She pushed back her covers, tiptoed to the hallway door and grabbed the doorknob.

  “Don’t open the door,” another voice said. “He’s out there … in the hall.”

  “Who is out there?” Maya’s heart pounded. Her ears pulsed with the sound of blood rushing through her veins. She looked behind her, expecting to see the green boy.

  “Angel is out there.”

  The closet door swung open and Elly stood in the opening. Her eyes were wide open but she seemed to be looking straight through Maya.

  “Elly?”

  “Angel is out there. Don’t open the door.”

  “I won’t.” Maya led her aunt to the side of the bed.

  Elly sat down. “What are we doing in your room, Maya?”

  “You were in my closet. You must have been sleepwalking.”

  “I was dreaming of that green boy.” Elly headed for the door.

  “You told me not to open the door, Elly. You said Angel was in the hallway.”

  Elly pressed and ear against the door before she opened it. She sighed as if relieved. “Of course he’s not there. Of course not. Sorry, I must have scared you.”

  “A little bit, yeah. Want me to walk you back to your room, Elly?”

  “Nah. You go on back to sleep, baby girl. I’m sorry about this. It was just one of those dreams that seem much too real.”

  Maya said, “I’m going downstairs to get a drink of water. The pizza we had for dinner made me thirsty.” Maya followed Elly to th
e bathroom door, and then she continued downstairs. As usual, the dining room felt icy cold as she passed through. Her breath made clouds and then the heat in the kitchen felt as if she stood in front of an open oven door. She filled a glass with tap water and sat down at the table.

  Moonlight poured in through the kitchen window, forming a golden square on the linoleum floor. Something glistened there. Something gleamed outside the basement door. She turned on the light and found a puddle of water. A sliver of ice slid down the face of the yellow door and another floated on the surface of the puddle. Another, smaller puddle had formed a foot away, and a third puddle just beyond that—foot shaped puddles, heading toward the dining room. Maya shuddered. Angel was here. This time … had he managed to get beyond the basement door? Had he crossed the kitchen? The yellow door was unlocked? She tried the lock. Locked. She followed the footprints into the dining room where the puddles became thin smears. How far had Angel gone? Upstairs? Maya searched the stairs for wet spots but found none. Had Elly seen him, even though she slept? Had Angel stood outside Maya’s bedroom door?

  Maya checked the basement door again. She unlocked it, and locked it again. She wiped up the puddles with paper towels. She listened for the groan of footsteps on the basement stairs, for the sound of breathing, for Angel’s whisper. She heard nothing.

  The wet footprints had been small, very small. Elly was barefoot. She must have come downstairs, sleepwalking. She must have stepped in water.

  Stepped in melted ice? It must have been Elly’s footprints across the linoleum.

  Maya checked the locks on the backdoor and the living room door before returning upstairs.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-NINE

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, ELLY had no memory of sleepwalking, and no memory of their pre-dawn conversation in Maya’s bedroom.

  Coty tapped on the kitchen door and stuck his head inside. “I’m heading into town to get some supplies. Want to go?”

  “I can’t,” Maya said. “Elly asked me to dismantle some old iron beds in the attic and haul them down to the back porch. The Salvation Army truck will be by this afternoon to pick them up.”