The Family Plot (10 page)

The number Chuck gave her rang, and rang, and then stopped with a click.

“You've reached Augusta Withrow. I'm not home right now, so please leave your name and a message, and a number where I can reach you. I'll return your call when I'm able. Thank you.”

Holy shit. Dahlia had reached a landline with an answering machine. It surprised her so much she almost forgot to say anything after the beep.

She found her voice and fumbled with it. “Hello, Ms. Withrow? My name is Dahlia Dutton—I'm Chuck's daughter, and I'm at your old house, leading the salvage operation. I've encountered something strange, and I was wondering if I could speak with you. Perhaps you could swing by, if you're in the area? Or … or you could call me back, if you prefer. It's pretty important, I think.” She paused, uncertain as to how she ought to wrap up. “I'd really appreciate a minute of your time.” She left her cell number, and hung up. Then she joined the guys in the kitchen and made herself a meal stacked with slices of turkey and ham.

The rain came and went, mostly letting up by the time the sandwiches were reduced to crumbs and greasy fingerprints.

Dahlia checked her phone enough times to decide it was stupid to keep looking, and that no self-respecting old Southern lady would return a call after eight o'clock. She stuffed the phone in her back pocket, collected her belongings from the foyer where everything was still piled up, and left them in the master bedroom. Then she returned downstairs and announced her intention to climb up into the carriage house loft before showering and settling in for the night.

“The rain's tapered off,” she noted, “and it's too early to crash. I'm kind of restless, anyway.”

Gabe leaped to his feet. “Me too!” Because of
course
he was. They'd never gotten around to that safety survey. He probably wanted to check the rest of the place for stowaways and creeps.

Brad was already half asleep on top of the remaining sleeping bags. He didn't open his eyes when he flapped his hand in their direction and said, “I can't move. Go on without me.”

Bobby tapped him with his foot. “Come on, now. Get up.”

“Leave me behind,” Brad pushed back. “My arms are killing me. My legs are killing me. My back is killing me.”

“Uncle Chuck will kill you if I tell him you were useless.”

Dahlia frowned. “Knock it off, Bobby. Today was his first full day on this kind of job, and he did good. Give him a break.”

“Nobody ever gives
me
a break.”

“You take plenty without asking. Now shut up and either help me and Gabe, or don't. This is an after-hours project for funsies. If you're not going to be any fun, then stay here with Brad.” She strolled to the door, trusting Gabe to follow her.

Bobby hesitated beside Brad's prostrate form, sprawled across his improvised chaise. Dahlia assumed that her cousin's laziness would beat out his curiosity—after all, he wasn't working for Music City because of any particular passion, he was only in it for the steady paycheck, and maybe to prove something to his kid about holding down a real job. Unless that was giving him too much credit.

Either way, he surprised her by asking, “Is it still wet out there?”

“If a little damp is all the difference between you being useful or not, then don't waste our time. You and Brad can stay here and have a little slumber party.”

“Go…,” Brad urged. “Let me nap in peace.”

“All right, I'm going.”

It surprised Gabe, too. “Really, Dad? You want to come?”

“Yeah, really. Hold the door, I'm right behind you.”

Dahlia grabbed an LED lantern as she left. She turned it on, and turned it up. It flared bright white, throwing hard black shadows all over the porch. They moved like puppets, jerky and bouncing, and when she skipped down the stairs into the yard, they only grew taller behind her. They multiplied when Gabe and Bobby joined her in the wet grass, each one holding a lantern of his own.

She didn't like the look of it, these projections of stretch-limbed monsters. She especially didn't like the way they moved when she moved, waving the lantern to light up the guys, the yard, and the scenery as far as the lamp would reach.

She held it high and looked back and forth between the carriage house and the trucks, but a fine mist of drizzle fogged the space between her and the buildings. She saw nothing but their vague and angular shapes, hulking in the muted dark.

“I'll get the ladder,” Gabe offered. He made for the truck.

“So it's me and you, then?” Bobby gave Dahlia an elbow to the arm, almost friendly. “Just like the old days?”

She could've pushed back, but it was late, and her heart wasn't in it. He didn't want to fight, and she didn't, either. “Yeah, finding this place … it would've really been something, when we were kids.” She stomped down toward the carriage house, its lawn dotted with leftover piles of things they'd planned to keep, before they changed their minds.

The growing scrap heap by the door was covered by one of the flapping blue tarps. As Dahlia passed it, she checked to make sure it was tied down all right, secure enough against the rain.

Encouraged by her idle nostalgia, Bobby said, “We could've spent a week, poking around the grounds.”

“We're
going
to spend a week, poking around the grounds.”

“But now it's a job. Back then, it would've been an adventure—a real one. Not like that cave on Aunt Edna's farm. Not like the empty dry-goods store, before they tore it down. And it's
way
cooler than that duplex on Vine Street.”

“Way bigger, too. Best of all, there are no dead mummy cats. So far.”

He fell into step beside her, and helped with the sagging wood door they'd shut before leaving. “Bigger, older. It even smells better; never mind the rat shit. You remember the magazines? They'd all turned into sticky bricks, from the floor to the ceiling. You remember?”

“Yeah, Bobby. I remember.”

The old man on Vine Street had been a hoarder. When he died, the fire department had to cut a hole through the side of the house and pull out debris with a bulldozer in order to reach his body. All the neighborhood kids had sat on the curb, enraptured, as the scene unfolded. Some of them came back later.

She and Bobby had snuck out of their respective houses after the body was gone, and climbed inside through the hole the bulldozer had left. They'd brought dinky plastic flashlights, and a disposable film camera. None of the pictures ever came out. Even with the flash turned on, there was nothing to see but dirty junk and the occasional white orb reflected off a mirror or a window, bleaching even the junk away.

Dahlia nodded. “I remember the garbage. The Tupperware containers Mr. Hunt had labeled with masking tape and a marker … all of them full of mold and black slime.”

“You remember the plants?”

She finished pushing the door far enough open to let Gabe inside with the ladder. She could hear him closing up the truck, so he'd be along shortly. “They'd been dead for so long, they looked like statues made out of sticks.”

“You wouldn't let us steal anything, you goody two-shoes.”

“There was nothing worth stealing, you thug. I still have trouble breathing, just thinking about that place.” The mold. The mildew. The dander of animals long since rendered as ghostly as the potted plants.

Gabe announced himself with the jostle and clank of the aluminum ladder knocking against the scrap heap, the doorframe, and then the edge of the door itself. He strolled past his father and Dahlia, and set it up firmly beneath the big square hole in the ceiling. “Wow—I left you alone for two whole minutes, and you didn't bite each other's heads off.”

“Dahlia's not your mother,” Bobby shot back. “She gives me a fighting chance.”

Dahlia coughed to mask a laugh. She followed Gabe, and pressed on the ladder's braces to double-check that they were set, and set firmly. Everything looked good. “All right, kid. You toted the equipment, so you get first gander, if you want it.”

He was halfway up the ladder before the last word was out of her mouth. It made her smile. Bobby was in it for the money, such as it was … but Gabe had been well and truly bitten by the bug. His head and shoulders disappeared through the hole, followed by his arm, holding a light aloft.

“What do you see?” his father asked.

“Y'all hang on. It's dark up here.”

“I know. That's what the light's for.”

Gabe sighed, and took another step up on the ladder. “Thanks for the tip. There's a lot of space, all right? It's all cluttered. It's hard to see anything.” He pulled one knee up onto the landing. “It's just walls and walls of stuff, like, closing in on you, almost.”

Dahlia winced to hear a timber groan beneath his weight. “Gabe, baby—be careful.”

“I
am.
”

The other knee came up too, and the beam moaned, but did not crack. He bounced gently. “I think it'll hold me.”

“You
think
?” his father demanded.

“It looks more solid over here. This part, it's rotted out. There's…” He huffed, and puffed, and pulled himself off the ladder altogether, bringing his whole body onto the second floor. “There's a hole in the ceiling. Water's gotten inside, but only right here. Right over the hatch.”

“So that's why there's no ladder left behind,” Dahlia observed. “It must've rotted out.” But a glance around the floor didn't reveal any hints of an old ladder, wooden or otherwise. Whoever had last used the place for storage must've taken it with him.

It was a small detail, but it bothered her all the same. She couldn't shake the idea that someone had thought they shouldn't look up there, like there was something they shouldn't see, or something that wasn't safe.

She should've gone first. She shouldn't have let the biggest member of her crew climb up in an uncertain space. She regretted it with every noisy footfall overhead. “Gabe, I'm coming up behind you.”

“And I'll be right behind
her,
” Bobby declared.

But she stopped him. “Wait,” she begged. “Just wait a minute. Listen, you heard the floor, didn't you? It's no good up there. Let me check it out first. If one of us falls through or gets stuck, we'll need you to help us out.”

“You're trying to hog my kid again.”

“What?”

“You heard me. You like him better than you like me.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I've known you twice as long; but between the two of you, he's the most loyal.” Any idle goodwill Bobby'd mustered with his trip down memory lane fizzled right out. “I'm trying to look out for him, that's all.”

“That's
my
job.”

“It's also your job to do what I tell you, at least while we're here.” Before he could wind up to a dying duck fit, she held up a finger and lowered her voice. “You outweigh me by fifty pounds. Let me test the floor up there. If it's safe, I'll holler, and you can come on up. Your kid is happy we haven't killed each other yet. Throw us all a curveball for once, and don't let him down.”

Without waiting for a retort, she slipped the lantern's hanging loop down around her wrist and started to climb. “Gabe?” she called out. “You're being awful quiet. Did you find something?”

At the top of the ladder, she was greeted with a drop of water to the eyeball. It wasn't raining again, but Gabe was right: The roof had a hole in it. On the other side, she could see lacy black clouds just a half-shade lighter than the sky itself—pierced here and there by only the most determined stars, and a smudged gray shadow that showed where the moon ought to be.

She wiped her eye and cheek with the back of one arm, and took the lantern by its handle again.

The second floor, or the loft, or the attic, or whatever it was … it wasn't packed to the rafters like the first floor used to be, but it was plenty cluttered. At a hasty glance she saw furniture, paneled doors, milk crates—or maybe peach crates, or some other kind of crates—and more horse tack. She picked out a set of oars that maybe went with the rowboat that had fallen apart downstairs.

She didn't see Gabe.

“Gabe? Where'd you go?” Dahlia climbed off the ladder, testing the floor with every step to see if it would hold. It squeaked, creaked, and once she got past the loft entrance, it held just fine—even when she rocked back and forth on her feet, and stomped a couple of times. “Gabe?”

“Over here.” He breathed it in a whisper so soft, she barely heard it over the faint patter of drizzle on the copper roof.

She followed the whisper around a pair of French doors with the glass all shattered out. Her feet crunched across the broken pieces, and her footsteps were far too loud in her own ears.

Why hadn't she heard Gabe moving around up there? He was twice her size, easy, and none too light on his feet at the best of times. Why wasn't there a ladder under the loft entrance until they brought one? Why was her cousin whispering? Who was wearing yellow cotton, all out of season?

Ahead she saw the glow of his lantern, reassuring in the cave-like loft.

He was on the far side of a set of fin de si
è
cle screens, moth-eaten and ravaged by rats, mold, and anything else that will ruin fine silk on a balsa frame. A scene was painted upon them, or embroidered onto them, Dahlia couldn't tell. She saw the ragged outlines of trees, mountains, and water. The rest was too badly damaged to make out.

Gabe's body showed through the holes. His shadow was large against the rest of it. He was hunkered over something, or crouching down.

Dahlia rounded the screens with her light and saw him, knees bent, his hands clasping the edges of an open trunk. He was pale, even when she considered the vivid, stark white produced by the lanterns. He clutched the trunk like it was a toilet and he needed to vomit.