A Summer with the Dead Page 28

  “Like I told you before, baby girl, Angel had a cruel handsomeness. I’ll give him credit for trying hard. Since Lyla’s arrival, Angel started showering daily, and wearing clean clothes and shaving and getting regular haircuts. I think he even started getting manicures. But he was no spring chicken. He was probably in his late-fifties. And Fritz … well, Fritz was in his mid-twenties back then. You’ve seen him. He’s now the same age Angel was back then, but Fritz was in better shape.”

  Elly paused there and stared at the yellow basement door for a minute before she continued.

  “Fritz was always in great shape right up until today. Until now. Heh.

  “Have you ever realized how feeble most women are, Maya? Compared to men we’re scrawny things. Even if we’re at the top of our physical strength, we don’t have the weight behind us, and I mean muscle weight. We can haul off and plug a man in the face … maybe break his nose if we’re lucky … maybe keep him down long enough to run if we kick him in the nuts first … but in a real confrontation, we’re pathetic. Maybe that’s why God made men so vulnerable when it comes to sex. Men are helpless if they’re smitten. Sex is their Achilles heel. Watching Angel stumble around trying to impress Lyla was downright comical. When she looked up from her desk and made eye contact with Fritz that first time … there was instant chemistry. It was like electricity in the air. Angel felt it too. He looked like a balloon with a slow leak.

  “A week later, Lyla resigned. She just up and quit—walked out the door. One of the drivers told me she had already shacked up with Fritz. A month after that, her ex-husband shot and killed her outside the strip club. Angel had pursued Lyla, but he lost. It was after that he turned really mean. After that was when he hurt me. Angel hates everybody … but he especially hates Fritz.”

  *

  “Hated,” Maya corrected. “Past tense. Angel is dead, Aunt Elly.”

  Elly pulled her gaze away from the bay window. “Yes, he most assuredly is, baby girl, and Fritz is probably dead too. Fritz is either dead or praying death takes him soon, but neither of them are done hating. Angel and Fritz—they’ll be down there together in that basement a long time, maybe forever … or until this farm is nothing but a pile of rot.”

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-SIX

  COTY’S MIDNIGHT-BLUE DODGE RAM rumbled by the kitchen window. He parked behind the shed under the overhanging shake roof and turned the engine off.

  Back in April, when Maya first arrived at the farm, there had been two cords of firewood stacked in that very spot. Back then Coty had parked behind the woodpile and tossed a brown tarp over his truck, but it had been a cold, damp, spring and she and Elly had used up most of that firewood. A half row of wood remained. That half row leaned against the back of the shed, and Coty was no longer splitting and stacking firewood. He was no longer forming bundles of kindling. Maya and Coty hoped to have Elly moved into the retirement home by the time it turned cold enough to need firewood again. Coty said, “The new owners can split their own firewood.”

  Coty rounded the front side of the shed with a Red Apple grocery sack in his right arm and the handle of a small, brown leather case in his left hand.

  He spotted Maya at the kitchen window and smiled. Maya stepped through the open door.

  “Is that it?” she asked. “The ALS thing?”

  “Yeah. Is this a good time?”

  “Yeah, Elly’s asleep. She should be asleep for at least a couple hours. I slipped a Lorazapam into her lemonade at lunchtime.”

  “I wish you could have convinced her to go shopping in Graceville instead of her staying at the farm,” Coty said. “I’m uncomfortable with her being here at all.”

  “I tried hard to convince her to go, but she doesn’t shop anymore. ‘I don’t need anything,’ she said. What are we going to say if she wakes up and finds us using this thing in the upstairs hallway?”

  Coty kicked open his bunkhouse door. “We’ll say, Elly, we’re just searching for traces of old blood. You don’t mind, do you?”

  Maya grimaced. “Not funny.”

  Coty set the grocery sack on the table and the ALS case on the kitchen counter. “Don’t worry, Maya. I’ll tell her it was all my idea,” Coty said. “I’ll say I talked you into it. I’ll say I just wanted to try out my new piece of investigative equipment.”

  “Elly doesn’t know you’re a private investigator, remember?”

  “Oh yeah. That’s right. Well, maybe I can convince her that I just got my P.I. license and thought this thing needed testing. You just act dumb.”

  “She’d never believe it.”

  “Let’s hope she doesn’t wake up then,” Coty said.

  Coty shoved a six-pack of Beck’s and a dozen eggs into the refrigerator, along with three honey crips apples, a small loaf of bread and a block of cheddar.

  They hurried across the driveway and into the house. Maya halted in the middle of the kitchen, eyes closed, listening. Not a sound. She glanced over at the yellow basement door. Locked. She checked the clock. 1:30 PM. “Elly’s been asleep a half hour. We’ve got to be done by 2:30, okay?”

  “It won’t take that long.” Coty took the main stairs two at a time with Maya on his heels.

  Elly’s bedroom door was closed. Maya leaned close and listened.

  “She’s snoring,” Maya whispered.

  Coty placed the case on the floor of the upstairs landing and flipped open the latch. Inside the case were three glass containers and a plastic spray bottle. One container was labeled Luminol, the second contained potassium hydroxide, and the third bottle’s label read, hydrogen peroxide.

  “My friend, Walt, already mixed up a batch. All we do is spray the area we want to test,”

  Coty whispered.

  “Spray right here.” Maya pointed to the place where Coty knelt. He looked down at the dark hardwood floor with a frown.

  Coty sprayed a four-foot circle with the liquid. He stepped back. “Nothing,” he said.

  Maya almost gasped with relief. That was the spot where she had seen her father, where his gray image floated in the dusky hallway, his voice sounding miles away when he screamed, ‘get away from this place.’

  “You okay?” Coty asked.

  Nodding, Maya swallowed the lump in her throat. She pointed down the hallway. “In front of that door at the end,” she whispered. “Where we saw Danny.”

  They halted at the end of the hallway. Coty sprayed the entire area.

  “Nothing.”

  “I don’t understand. This is where I’ve always seen Danny. He floats in the air, right in this part of the hallway, and then he …”

  “Then he what?”

  “You saw him, Coty. It’s like something pulls him away. Something drags him straight through the door, but when I open the door, there’s nothing there but the stairs going down into the skylight room.”

  Coty opened the door. “Ever seen Danny in the skylight room?”

  “Once.” They descended the stairs. “Just once,” Maya said, “not long after I arrived here, but after that, he’s always been in the upstairs hall.”

  “What else?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What else has happened to you in here? What else have you seen or experienced in this room?”

  “I’ve already told you everything … well, except for the incident with my watch. It disappeared from my bedside table the very first night I was here. Later, I found it on the main stairs, coated with dust as if it had been there for months.”

  “I know you’re not telling me everything, Maya.”

  “You’re right, I’m not—but I will once we find Danny, and once we get Elly into the retirement home. I made Elly a promise to not tell some things … not until she’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Dead.”

  “Hell. That crazy lady is healthy as a horse. That could be twenty-five years. Maybe thirty.”

  “I promised her.”

  It took ten minutes for Coty to s
pray the floor and walls of skylight room. When he’d circled the room twice, he halted at the base of the wood paneled wall. There, spots on the hardwood floor glowed blue.

  “Do you see that?” Coty said. “Something happened here in the past, but it wasn’t a lot of blood. A bad cut or scrape could have caused that much. This part of the house was an add-on in the fifties, with plenty of sawing and hammering. Accidents happen.”

  “I thought we’d find more than this. Are you sure this blood testing stuff really works?”

  “Show me a spot where you know for sure, blood has been.”

  “The dining room,” Maya said. “And the kitchen.”

  Coty strode around through the living room and into the dining room. He sprayed the floor between the dining table and the window. The entire floor glowed blue. He sprayed the tabletop. “Look at that! The whole tabletop is blue.” He sprayed the floor all the way around the table. “It’s like this room was painted with blood.”

  “Check the kitchen,” Maya said. Five minutes later Coty said,

  “The entire kitchen floor glows blue. What the hell happened here?”

  “It’s an old house. Things could have happened before Elly and Harlan moved in.”

  “Such as?”

  “I’ve heard about farmers cutting up hogs and cattle in their kitchens during cold weather,” Maya said. “Maybe some hunters cut up a dear. I don’t know.”

  Maya felt guilty. Coty’s narrowed gaze was an accusation. She turned her gaze out the bay window toward the garden. Coty knew she was hiding something. He knew she was protecting Elly. Why am I protecting Elly? Maya shook her head. I don’t know.

  “I’ll tell you everything after Elly is gone,” Maya said. “But, I’ll tell you about Danny, as soon as I know anything. I think Elly’s going to tell me about Danny pretty soon.”

  Coty glared at the old linoleum. “Your explanation doesn’t add up,” he said. “The hogs, the calf … dear hunters? Those animals are drained of blood outside, before they’re butchered. They’re not brought into the house to bleed-out.”

  “When Elly is gone I’ll …”

  “Why are you protecting that old bitch?”

  “Don’t call her that.”

  “She did something to Danny. I know it. And you know it.”

  “I suspect it, but I don’t know it.”

  Coty placed the ALS case on the kitchen counter, opened it and jammed the spray bottle into its slot. He slammed the case shut and strode out the kitchen door. Maya held her breath as he crossed the driveway and kicked open his bunkhouse door. It slammed shut behind him.

  “I knew I could trust you.”

  Maya jumped at the sound of Elly’s voice. She twisted her head around and discovered Elly standing on the bottom step, on the other side of the dining room.

  “How long have you been standing there?” Maya asked.

  “Long enough to know you haven’t told Coty anything important yet.”

  “I promised you I’d keep your secrets and I keep my promises,” Maya said. “Coty’s name is Wayne C. Matheson and he isn’t Judith’s nephew.”

  “What’s he doing here?”

  “He’s looking for his nephew, Danny.”

  Elly stepped down and crossed through the dining room in her robe and slippers. “What time is it?”

  “2:25 in the afternoon.”

  “Things are coming to an end, Maya.” Elly sat down at the kitchen table as if she were exhausted.

  “An end? What do you mean?”

  “I’ve known for some time now. When I was in the hospital and they were running all those test on me? I knew then.”

  “But your tests all came back great. Dr. Framish said you’re very healthy.”

  “Doctors don’t know everything.”

  “Are you feeling ill, Aunt Elly?”

  Elly shook her head. “No, I’m just tired. The only time I have any energy is when I’m angry, but that’s not healthy.”

  “Angry?”

  “Like when Fritz showed up. I had energy then, didn’t I?”

  Maya remembered how Elly chased Fritz through the attic room and down the long, straight flight of stairs. For a woman in her mid-seventies, Elly had moved with surprising agility.

  “I don’t want you to feel angry, Aunt Elly. Anger is as bad as fear.”

  “No, no. Fear is worse than anger. Fear is almost as bad as grief, but grief is the worst, because grief doesn’t end. When I went to see Stephen, your father, in the institution, they told me there was very little chance he’d ever be released. Back then, Stephen was the only kin I cared about. Everyone else was gone. My father, my mother. I’d never met any cousins or grandparents. Uncle Felix … he was blood kin but I didn’t love him, and Fritz said Uncle Felix is probably dead now anyway, remember? I believe Felix is dead. You’re all I have left, Maya. You’re all I care about.”

  Maya nodded. She had nothing to say. No answers.

  “Want to know something I saw at the institution, Maya? Something so sweet and so sad, it broke my heart?”

  “If it would help to talk about it, okay.”

  “After they told me Stephen would never leave that place, his doctor showed me a room where they kept some of the patients’ personal belongings … things the patients brought with them, but that were taken away for one reason or another. Safety, I suppose. Belts and shoelaces. Drugs. Knives. Knitting needles. Sharp things.” Elly sighed. Her eyes looked blurry. She rubbed her palms against her eyes and sniffed. “It was such a big storage room, filled with suitcases and trunks. The doctor—I can’t recall his name—he showed me Stephen’s suitcase. It was packed so neatly. Stephen was a tidy boy. His bedroom was always tidy. Not many boys make their beds every day like Stephen did. Men don’t seem to care much about things like that.

  “‘We allowed him to have the photo of you,’” the doctor told me. “But we took the metal frame and the glass away, of course. He has his shoes, but not the laces. He wanted his bible and I allowed that.”

  “Dad had a bible?” Maya asked.

  Elly nodded. “Stephen went to Sunday school as a boy. He went every Sunday until about the age of fourteen. He never said why he stopped going, but I suspect I know why.

  “I guess the doctor allowed him his favorite pair of pajamas. Those were the ones he used … he tore them into strips and wove an eight foot long rope. Eight feet was just long enough.

  “I still remember all those suitcases in that storage room. I dream about that storage room sometimes. There were so many suitcases propped open, displayed on the shelves for people like me to see. I don’t think it was right, allowing strangers to see their personal things. Odd things. Unusual things. I remember one patient had a lot of baseball cards. Another had a whole box of broken, worn down crayons, like a little kid might have. One lady had beautiful scarves and some beaded headbands from the nineteen twenties. One had three pair of ballet shoes, well worn. One man had several military medals. Another man had a small trunk full of little, clear boxes and inside each box was a beautiful, hand-made fishing fly. There were over two hundred of them, apparently.

  “I can picture those poor souls carefully placing each item, one after the other into their suitcases, along with the memory attached to it. Evidence of insanity? Not nearly. No. Just memories they couldn’t stand to leave behind.”

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-SEVEN

  MAYA PAINTED BOTH THE upstairs and downstairs bathrooms, even though Elly said it wasn’t necessary. Now, there was only one gallon of white semi-gloss remaining, having started with the pantry hallway and the big cupboards. Maya liked the way things looked when painted white. If not new, at least pristine—not yet corrupted by human touch.

  “Want me to sand down and paint the basement door, too?” Maya asked. “That old yellow paint is blistered and peeling. I can putty over the bullet holes.”

  “Nope.” Elly had said. “Go ahead and paint everything you want, except that door. I’m going u
pstairs to take a nap.”

  It was late afternoon when Maya stowed the brush, the roller, and the paint pan, inside the utility closet. She stood at the kitchen sink with her hands under warm running water, rubbing paint from her nails and fingers. She pulled her painting scarf off her head as a man strode up the driveway from the shadow of the trees.

  With a frown, Maya opened the back door and confront him before he reached the porch. “What do you want, Benson?”

  “We need to talk,” he said. “May I have a drink of water?”

  “I’m not letting you inside.”

  “May I have a drink of water though?”

  “Stay right here.” Maya closed the door. She took a clean glass from the drying rack on the counter and filled it from the tap. The kitchen door opened and Benson stepped inside. “I told you to wait outside,” she said.

  “It’s too hot out there.”

  “Where did you park? I don’t see your car.”

  “It’s out on the road, by the mailbox,” Benson said. “I didn’t want you or your crazy aunt to slash my tires or take a baseball bat to the windshield.”

  Maya chuckled. “It’s quite a walk in from the road, isn’t it? You might as well start back now if you want to miss the line of traffic at the ferry. Or do you plan to drive all the way around the sound to Tacoma?”

  Benson accepted the glass of water and sat down at the kitchen table. “Let me catch my breath, Maya.”

  “If Aunt Elly hears you, she’ll be down here in a flash with her shotgun.”

  Benson grinned. “A real Annie Oakley, huh?”

  “You’d be surprised, Bens.”

  “Nothing about your family surprises me, Maya. You come from a long line of loonies.”

  “Don’t go there, Bens.”

  “Why are you so anxious for me to leave? Why don’t you want me here? I just want to discuss something with you.”

  “Such as?”

  “My inheritance.”

  “I don’t care about that. Go ahead and sign the divorce papers and keep it all for yourself. I don’t want you or your mother’s money.”