Spirit (17 page)

“It was built in 1923.”

“Wow.” He sounded impressed.

Sam clucked his tongue at all the boxes and piles of junk everywhere. “You ever throw anything away?”

“A lot of this stuff is Sally’s,” I said a bit defensively. “Sally’s and Paul’s, actually. When I took over the house she asked me to store some of her things for a while because the condo she was moving into wasn’t all that big. She said she’d have the stuff hauled away, but she never got around to it. Or maybe she conveniently forgot. So here it still sits.”

“Hmm,” Sam said.

He was running his hands over the brick walls that stood behind the furnace. The wall stretched from one end of the basement to the other. “If this house is ninety years old, then this must not be an original wall. The bricks look too new.”

I nodded. “Sally and Paul did a lot of work on the house. That is one of the repairs they made. I know there were some structural problems that needed to be set right when they bought the place. Something to do with the house’s foundation. That wall is part of it.”

Sam gazed down. “The concrete floor looks pretty new too.”

“Yes,” I said. “That was also part of the renovation.”

Sam turned to me. “Did you help them with the work?”

I stuck my finger in my cheek in my best impersonation of a pensive Shirley Temple. “Well, now let me think, Sam. Oh, yes, I remember. Your brother wasn’t butch enough to deal with it or smart enough to hire a contractor, so I brought over my trusty hod and trowel, and after laying all the bricks to my satisfaction, I then poured out thirty tons of concrete and smoothed out the floor with a spatula from the kitchen. I’ve always adored construction work. Haven’t you?”

Sam cocked his head to the side and gave me a blistering moue, with just a hint of a grin tweaking the corners of his mouth. “So the answer would be no, then.”

“Yes,” I snipped. “No.”

Timmy snickered from somewhere under the stairs. I glanced back at him and saw he had unearthed a hockey stick from somewhere. It must have been Paul’s. It sure wasn’t mine.

I took advantage of the lull in the conversation to take another stab at clarifying what Sam had said upstairs. I lowered my voice so Timmy couldn’t hear. “Uh, remember upstairs right after you told me how cute I was? Well, pursuant to that, you said something about—”

“The furnace is new too,” he interrupted, tapping the metal side of it with his knuckles. It gave out a hollow bonking sound. Sort of like his noggin might sound if I hit it with a shovel.

I tried not to growl. “I know. But about—”

Sam studied the raftered ceiling over his head, turning this way and that, following the lines of cables and water pipes and electrical wires heading off hither and yon to different parts of the house.

“The electrical work is new too.”

I heaved a sigh. Maybe if I played along, he’d shut up about the house long enough for me to ask about what he’d said upstairs. “Yes. The wiring and all the pipes were redone before Paul and Sally bought the house from the previous tenant.”

“And who was the previous tenant?”

“I don’t know. Some old lady. She had been living here for like fifty years and was too old and sick to keep the place up, so it was pretty rundown when your brother and my sister came along. But I guess they saw the house’s potential, and since the old lady was ready to sell, they jumped at the chance.”

Sam was in the corner now, at the end of the new brick wall. He was standing on a chair, inspecting the cable and wires running across the ceiling. Electrician at work. For some reason that turned me on, but then, not much about Sam didn’t.

Sam was tapping the wall with a pen. He sounded confused. “Whoever laid the brick wall did a terrible job of sealing the room around the electrical wires and pipes. The wall itself looks okay, but where it seams to the end wall and ceiling, it looks like a third-grader did it.”

“The wall’s still standing,” I said. “That’s good enough for me.”

Sam clomped down off the chair and smiled. “You’re getting mad.”

“No. Dis my house all you want.” I lowered my voice again. “The next time I get your clothes off, you’re going to pay for every insult.”

Sam grinned. “I like the sound of that.”

“Talk louder!” Timmy cried from the other end of the basement. “I can’t hear you!”

Sam laughed and called back, “Maybe you weren’t meant to!”

When I turned to see where Timmy was, Sam walked up behind me and slid his arms around my waist, clasping his hands over my belly, squeezing me tight. His warm lips brushed the fuzz on the back of my neck, and a chill went up my spine.

“Later, you’re mine,” he whispered.

I almost said, “I’m yours now,” but bit my tongue before the words escaped. I closed my eyes, relishing the feel of his mouth on my neck, wishing it was foraging a little farther south. Wishing I could explain what he meant when he said what he said earlier. Hoping I knew. Wondering if I really did.

My cell phone chirped in my pocket.

Sam and I froze, waiting for whatever was about to happen. Would the furnace blow up? The phone start screaming and wailing again? The house be engulfed with sound? Six-foot crickets jump out of the wall?

“Answer it outside,” Timmy said. “Maybe Daddy can’t hear you there.”

We stared at the kid.
My God, could it really be that simple?

The phone chirped again. I could feel it vibrate against my leg.

“Try it,” Sam said, loosing his arms from around my waist. “Go out the back door. Talk in the yard.”

Not too thrilled about the idea, I decided perhaps it was worth the risk. Sally might be ready to sic the cops on me for disappearing with her child if I didn’t speak to her soon.

I fished the phone out and stared at it while unlatching the security door that led to the little flight of concrete steps leading from the basement to the backyard.

“I’ll stay with Timmy,” Sam said, watching me go.

I nodded and, blinking away the glare, stepped out into the burning sunshine. The cell phone chirped in my hand.

By the time I reached my little stand of cypress trees, which I hoped would be a safe enough distance from the house, the phone had rung twice more. Holding my breath in preparation for whatever psychic nightmare was about to befall me once I hit the receive button, I braced my feet and laid the phone to my ear.

Then with a click of my thumb, I answered the call.

To my amazement the sky didn’t come crashing down upon my head. And to my further amazement, it wasn’t Sally calling at all. It was Jack. And he was in a sour mood. That part wasn’t much of a surprise. He was usually in a sour mood when I was around.

“It’s about time you answered your phone, Jason! Where the hell have you been? Sally’s going apeshit!”

I was in no mood to take abuse from Jack. “How can you tell? She’s pretty much apeshit all the time.”

His voice was cold and unamused. “Answer me. Why haven’t you been answering your phone?”

The lie came so easily I didn’t even have to pause long enough to sound guilty. “They’re having a problem with telephone reception in the area. They’re working on it, but they don’t know yet what is causing it.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Prove it,” I snapped back like a taunting twelve-year-old. “What do you want, Jack?”

“How’s the kid?”

“He’s fine. You want to talk to him?”

“No.”

“How’s the vacation?”

“It sucks. Right now we just got off the train in some dump in Maine with a population of one hundred thirty-six people.”

“How do you know?”

“The fucking sign says so. So far, I’ve seen two Amish families in buggies clattering down the street. Christ, what a hole. There are three buildings I can see from here, and two of them are boarded up. The other one’s a church, and even it needs painting.”

“What are you going to do in a place like that?”

“Who the hell knows? Grab some sushi? Catch a musical? Go ask your sister. She’s the big tour director.”

Am I actually chatting with Jack? I hate Jack.

And lest I forget, Jack hates me. As if he suddenly remembered it too, Jack’s voice took a sinister turn. And if it got any
more
sinister, I was going to hang up on his ass.

“Sally wants to know what you’re talking about when you said you had a surprise for her concerning the house. She’s all worried about it. What the hell were you talking about, Rosemary, and why are you playing head games on your sister? They always filter down to me when you do that.”

“Good,” I said. “And stop calling me Rosemary, Dipshit.”

“
What
?”

It was fortuitous he couldn’t see the grin on my face. “Never mind,” I said. “Bad reception, like I said.”

“You’re not tearing the place up, are you? Knocking out walls and stuff? Remodeling?”

“What I do with my own house is no one’s business but my own. Let me talk to Sally.”

“She’s not here.”

“What do you mean she’s not there? There’s only a hundred thirty-six people in town, and they’re all Amish. How hard could it be to find her? She’s most likely the only one not wearing a bonnet on her head.”

“She’s in the ladies’ room.”

“Oh,” I said. I knew my sister. She could spend hours in a ladies’ room. Who knows doing what? After almost three weeks on the road with her, it seemed Jack had learned that fact as well.

A merry smile twisted my face. “They towed your car off this morning.”

“What?
What
?”

“They’re doing roadwork. You should have left me your keys.”

I chewed on the heel of my hand so I wouldn’t laugh out loud when Jack started cursing like a drunken sailor with Tourette’s syndrome. He swore with a great deal of heart and passion. One would almost think he had been rehearsing.

“Calm down,” I said. “I’m sure they didn’t dump it in the ocean. You can probably get your little toy car back at impound when you get home. May cost a few hundred bucks, but still—”

So then he started cursing again.

I hadn’t had this much fun since summer camp in the third grade. God, I had loved those all-boy communal showers.

“Well, if there’s nothing else,” I said, happily ignoring his tirade, “I’ll be toddling off. Things to see, people to do, and all that. You take care, Jack. Have fun with the Amish. You and them should get along just fine. After all, they are used to looking at horses’ asses all day.”

“You whiny little fruitcup motherfu
—
”

I tsked his bad language, then clicked off the phone with a chuckle.

God, what a beautiful day!

Of course, beautiful days never last.

And to prove it, I heard Sam calling from the basement. “Jason, you’d better get in here!”

Now what?

It was Timmy’s furious howl of outrage that really got me moving.

I
STUFFED
my phone in my pocket as I raced across the backyard and down the short flight of steps into the basement. There was an unholy racket going on inside. It sounded like someone was beating the crap out of the place with a baseball bat.

I wasn’t far wrong.

Sam stood in the center of the basement floor, waving his arms and urging me to hurry. As I drew near, he pointed to the banging noises coming from beyond the furnace in the far corner, farthest from the light.

Timmy was wielding Paul’s hockey stick like he was born to it. The kid was furious. His face was red, snot was running from his nose, and he must have been almost blinded, his eyes were so filled with tears.

He was cursing up a storm too. For a four-year-old, his vocabulary was pretty extensive. And while he was cussing and dripping tears and blowing snot everywhere, he was beating the hell out of the brick wall with the hockey stick.

The head of the stick had already broken off, splintered, and was lying at my feet where it had flown across the basement after the last strike it had made against the unforgiving bricks. Timmy was down to the four-foot handle now, but he was still flailing away at the brick wall like a man on a mission. He wanted to inflict
pain.
He wanted that wall to
bleed!

“Let him go, you shitty, poopheaded, assholey Pudding Pop!”

Pudding Pop?

Timmy railed on, accenting every curse with another stroke of the bat against the bricks. “Let him go, dammit! Let him go. He’s lonely, you stupid bunch of ugly fucking bricks. Let him go
now
.”

With every curse, Timmy slammed the hockey stick against the wall as hard as he could. Over and over and over again. Chips of fiberglass were flying everywhere. Already the stick was a good foot shorter than it had been when Timmy first found it among the boxes under the stairs.

Sam was frozen in place, too stunned to move, not knowing what he should be doing. I wasn’t much better.

I did finally gather up enough sense to step toward the boy, cooing softly, afraid Timmy would inadvertently take my head off with the hockey stick if I moved too close. Timmy didn’t look like he was tracking very well. I’m not sure he saw either Sam or me standing there at all.

I squinted my eyes against the fiberglass chips still flying through the air with every stroke of the stick against the bricks. Timmy was getting tired now. He was so mad, he was sobbing. But his sobs were still interspersed with what must have been every nasty word the kid had ever heard uttered by every foul-mouthed adult he had ever run across, including me.

“Poopy dickheaded mean old pile of stupid bricks! Nooooooo!”

I swooped in low and fast and grabbed the hockey stick from his hands just as he was rearing back to take another swipe at the wall. I threw the stick as far away as I could and reached in to pull Timmy into my arms, shushing him, trying to get him to calm down.

But he was hysterical. Any fool could see it. He began beating at my chest as I held him in my arms. Kicking and yelling like I was the brick wall now. His tiny fists flailed at my face as he screamed unintelligible noises like a feral animal, lost and blinded in his own world of fury and choler and homicidal wrath. It was a scary thing to watch in a four-year-old. Truly horrifying.