The Loveliest Dead (2 page)

“Yep,” Miles said. “I guess I’m ready for it.”

“Have you made any friends yet?”

“I met a guy named Todd Haney who says he’s got a big collection of Spider-Man comic books. He said I could come over and see ‘em.”
 

“Then you’ll have to do that.”

As Jenna brought a platter of waffles to the table, Miles looked up and said, “Could I, Mom?”

“Could you what?”

“Go over to Todd’s house after school and see his Spider-Man comics?”

“Well, I think it’d be a good idea if we met Todd first before you start going home with him after school.”

“Mom’s right,” David said. “Why don’t you bring him over here?”

“Hey,” Jenna said, “I’m not so sure I’m ready for extra kids around here yet.”

Miles said, “What if Todd’s mom wants to meet
me
before she lets him come over
here
?”
 

Jenna, David, and Martha laughed.

Miles smiled sheepishly, uncertain why they were so amused.

“You’re a smart kid,” David said.

Jenna poured herself a cup of coffee and took a seat at the table. As they began to fill their plates, she said, “We’ll do it someday soon, okay, Miles?”
 

“Okay,” he said.

“Today,” Jenna said, “I’d like to paint the kitchen cupboards with that paint we found in the garage last night.”

“If you wait for the weekend, I can do it,” David said.

“No, I don’t mind. In fact, I want to, I think it’ll be fun.”

They fell silent as they ate their breakfast. The music on the radio stopped for a news break.

“By the way, Mom,” Jenna said, “I heard your radio in the middle of the night last night. Do you think you could keep the volume a little lower? The music woke me up.”
 

“Music? I wasn’t listening to music last night,” Martha said. “I was listening to talk shows. But I turned it off a little after twelve, and it wasn’t loud enough for you to hear upstairs, I’m sure.” Martha had the downstairs bedroom. Since her stroke, she had trouble keeping her balance at times and occasionally had bouts of dizziness. They all thought it best that she not have to tackle the stairs.
 

Jenna frowned as she chewed a bite of bacon. “Well, I know I heard music. I got up and went to the bathroom, and by the time I came out, it had stopped.” She turned to Miles. “Were you listening to the radio last night?”
 

“Nope.”

“Maybe you dreamed it,” David said with a smirk.

Still frowning, Jenna said, “No. No, I definitely ... well... I could’ve sworn I heard music. Maybe ... I don’t know. Maybe I did dream it.” Her frown dissolved and they said no more as they ate their breakfast.
 

It was not a new house, by any means, but it was new to the Kellars. It was a rather boxy four-bedroom, two-bathroom house with a flat roof, fully furnished, that stood two stories tall on ten thickly wooded acres in northern California’s Humboldt County. It had a large square yard, and a two-car garage branched off from the house on the north side. It was a tired-looking gray with white trim, its paint peeling, the shingled roof in need of repair. The yard, surrounded by a tall, rusted Cyclone fence, was overrun with weeds. Shrubbery along the fence and around the house had gone wild, and ivy had crawled up the sides of the house like eager tendrils trying to pull it down into the ground.
 

Two clotheslines sagged between a couple of rusted metal poles in the backyard. An old rusted children’s swing set and slide stood nearby, both crawling with ivy. Inside, the house was equipped with central air and heat, but it would be a while before the Kellars could afford to use it. There was a fireplace in the living room and an enormous stack of chopped wood beneath an awning behind the garage.
 

The acreage was surrounded by a tall barbed-wire fence on three sides, with a cliff facing the ocean in back. The graveled driveway came off Starfish Drive through a long aluminum gate and went straight through the woods about half a mile to the house. A trail behind the house led to the cliff a couple hundred feet away, where a rickety wooden staircase zigzagged down the cliff face to the rocky, isolated beach below, known as Starfish Cove. The stairs were old and decayed and treacherous, and David had told Miles to stay away from them.
 

The house and yard needed work, but the Kellars did not mind. All the paperwork was out of the way and it was theirs, free and clear, left to Jenna by the father she never knew. Even with the yearly property taxes, it was a big improvement on the small apartment they had been renting about a hundred and sixty miles east of there in Redding.
 

After Josh died, everything had seemed to go sour for David and Jenna. David’s medical insurance at work had covered very little of the battery of tests Josh had gone through, and the bills had drained what little savings they had. A few months after Josh’s death, David, an auto mechanic, had lost his job when the owner of the garage where he worked had died and the place had closed, and he had been unable to find full-time work ever since.
 

Their little apartment had gotten smaller about eighteen months later when Martha had suffered a mild stroke and had come to live with them. Along with her monthly Social Security check and some savings, Martha had her retirement money from her many years working for Pacific Bell in Redding, and she was eager to help out as much as she could. She had aided them in paying off some, though not all, of the medical bills, and she helped with bills and groceries.
 

As old and run-down as the house was, it was a new start for the Kellars. It was just outside the city limits of Eureka, where David hoped to have better luck finding employment than he’d had in Redding. But most of all, it was a home of their very own. It belonged to them completely, warts and all.
 

Some time ago, someone had stripped all the paint from the wooden cupboards on both sides of the kitchen, then had neglected to repaint them. By eleven o’clock, the cupboards on the southern side of the kitchen were drying a soft creamy white, and Jenna, still in her sweats, was at work on the cupboards opposite them. The counter was covered with newspapers, and as she painted, she stood on a green folding stepladder.
 

Martha sat in the breakfast nook reading the
Global Inquisitor
while Glenn Miller’s “String of Pearls” played on her radio and tendrils of steam rose from a mug of green tea. Martha read all the tabloids every week, but the
Inquisitor
was her favorite.
 

The sky outside was dark with gunmetal-gray clouds. A strong wind had come up and whistled around the corners of the house. The rusty chains of the swings on the old set in the backyard screeched and rattled as they blew in the wind.
 

“A UFO landed in the middle of a park in Oslo, Norway,” Martha said, “and aliens came out and took a little boy off the monkey bars, hauled him into the flying saucer, and flew away.”
 

Jenna smiled and shook her head without turning away from her painting. “Mom, don’t you think if that really happened, it would be on the news?”
 

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe not.” Martha turned a page and adjusted her glasses. Her silver hair was short and curly. Her cane stood against the wall beside the breakfast nook’s bench. “They’re too busy with who’s screwin’ who in Hollywood and Washington. They’re not much different than the tabloids, you know.”
 

“Well, I won’t argue with that.”

“The Binghams cleared another house.”

“The who?”

“Arthur and Mavis Bingham, the occult investigators. Remember? I’ve told you about them before. They cleared another house possessed by demons. In Connecticut this time.”
 

Jenna dipped her brush in the can of paint on the counter. “Do they do yards? Maybe they could clear all the weeds and ivy outside.”
 

Martha laughed.

“How’s your bedroom coming along?” Jenna asked. “Have you got all your things unpacked and put away?”

“I’ve unpacked everything but my photo albums and jewelry. That’s a big room. Even with all my junk, it’s going to look half empty.”
 

“I promise to get those boxes out of there soon,” Jenna said. “But like you said, it’s a big room, and I needed someplace to put that stuff until I can unpack it.”

“No problem,” she said. She took a sip of her tea and turned another page.

After a set of commercials on the radio, Doris Day sang “Sentimental Journey.”

“I hope Miles is doing okay at school,” Jenna said.

“Oh, our Miles always does well at school. Hasn’t he always gotten good grades?”

“That’s not what I mean. Yes, he’s a great student, a lot better than I ever was.”

“You did well in school, Jenna.”

“But it was always such a struggle for me. I really had to work at it. It seems to come naturally for Miles. He’s very smart. No, I mean I hope he’s making friends. He’s so shy.”
 

“He said this morning he’d made a friend.”

“He said he’d met a boy—that’s not the same thing. He never complains about anything, he keeps everything inside.”
Josh was the same way
, she thought as she dipped the brush again.
 

Mommy—

“Last year,” Jenna said, “there was a boy at school who picked on him every day. Miles didn’t say a word about it. I only found out because one day after school he went to his bedroom as usual, and I took a snack to him, but his door was locked. He never locks his door. He didn’t want to open it at first, but I insisted, and when he let me in, I saw that he’d been crying.”
 

“Crying? Miles?”

“I almost had a heart attack when I saw the tears on his cheeks, because ... well, I just.. .”Jenna said nothing for a moment. When she’d seen the tears on Miles’s cheeks, panic had exploded inside her, because ever since Josh had died, she’d been living with the palpitating fear that something might happen to her only remaining son. But she said none of that. “It took me a while, but I finally got it out of him. He told me about that bully, and it made me so angry. Miles didn’t want me to do anything about it, and I promised him I wouldn’t, but that was a little white lie, because I called his teacher and told her about it. Apparently, she intervened somehow. I asked him about it a week later and he said things were okay, that the boy was leaving him alone.” She sighed. “Children can be so cruel to each other.”
 

“Speaking of children,” Martha said, “there are about half a dozen of them in the backyard right now playing on the slide and swing set.”
 

Jenna stopped painting and looked over at the breakfast nook. Martha was leaning to her left, craning her neck to peer out the breakfast-nook window. “What?”
 

“A bunch of boys. There’s, let’s see—one, two, three ... five of them.”

“It’s not even noon yet, they should be in school.”

“Well, they’re not.” Still looking out the window, Martha sipped her tea. “You know, you really should chase them off, Jenna. If one of them hurts himself in your yard, his parents are likely to sue you. Everybody’s suing everybody these days.”
 

The house was in such a remote location and so far off the main road, it seemed unlikely that a bunch of little boys would be playing in the yard. But Martha was obviously watching
something
.
 

Frowning, Jenna placed the brush across the top of the paint can and carefully climbed down off the stepladder. She walked over to the breakfast nook and slid onto the bench opposite Martha.
 

“Oh!” Martha said softly, her back suddenly stiff.

Jenna looked out the window. The backyard was empty. The two swings twisted and swayed in the wind. She looked across the table at her mother.
 

“There are no kids out there now, Mom.”

Martha’s eyes were wide behind her large, silver-framed glasses as her head turned slowly from the window to face Jenna. “They disappeared.”
 

Jenna looked out the window again. They hadn’t had time to climb over the Cyclone fence, which would have been difficult, so there was only one direction the boys could have gone. “Did they head for the front yard?”
 

“They disappeared into the ground.”

Jenna looked at her again, this time with a wrinkled brow, and a chill passed over her shoulders.

Martha’s eyes lowered to her cup of tea. She looked as if she were about to cry.

“Are ... are you all right, Mom?”

She said nothing for a moment, did not even move.

Martha had become much more forgetful since the stroke. She lost her train of thought during conversations and forgot what she was saying. She did silly little things, like searching for her glasses while they were on her face, or remembering conversations or events that had never taken place. But this was the most drastic thing that had happened so far—that Jenna was aware of, anyway.