The Town (16 page)

Julia laughed.

“You think I’m joking?”

“No. Not after my experience at the library.”

“Comet conspiracies are just the tip of the iceberg.”

“What are you doing this afternoon?” Julia asked.

“No plans. Why?”

“Would you like to come over?”

“Sure.” She nodded at her half-filled shopping cart. “Just let me take this home and get it put away.”

“You know where we live?”

“Of course.”

Something about Deanna’s tone of voice, her surprise at the fact that the question had been asked at all, set off Julia’s internal alarm. “ ‘Of course’?” she repeated.

Deanna frowned. “You live in the old Megan . . .” She trailed off, realization dawning in her face. “Oh, my God. You don’t know, do you?”

“Know what?”

“About your house. What happened.”

A chill crept down Julia’s spine. She didn’t want to hear what was coming next, but she knew she could not turn back. “No,” she said. “I guess not.”

“It was a while ago, and several people have lived there since, but . . .” She shook her head. “I don’t exactly know how to put this.”

Julia felt cold. “What?”

“A family called the Megans were living in the house. They’d been there for . . . well, for years. They’d lived there for a long time. And one day the father, Bill Megan, just snapped. He woke up in the middle of the night and . . . killed his family. His wife, their kids. He shot them all. Then he killed himself. No one knows why. He hadn’t been fired from his job or anything. Nothing traumatic had happened. He just . . . he went crazy.”

Julia licked her suddenly dry lips. “How many kids were there?”

“Three.”

All at once her fears and worries didn’t seem quite so silly—all at once the dread she’d felt was understandable, made sense.

“I wondered why you two would live there.” Deanna shook her head. “I can’t believe no one told you.”

“Who
could’ve
told me?” she said, but at the instant she said it she thought of the Molokans at the picnic. “I don’t really know anyone in town.”

Deanna laid a hand on her arm. “You do now.”

Julia nodded, forced herself to smile, though inside she felt like ice. “Yes,” she said. “I do now.”

 

She confronted Gregory the minute he came home. Deanna had left only a few moments before, and Julia was still putting away cups and dishes when Gregory walked through the door.

She told him everything: Deanna’s story and the fleshed-out details her new friend had provided, her own uneasy feelings about the house, the mysterious box of dishes that had fallen for no apparent reason. She threw it at him angrily, getting in his face, but he seemed neither surprised nor particularly upset by her behavior. He was calm, rational, and his unflappability only increased her anger.

“What do you want to do?” he said. “Move?”

She met his eyes. “Yes.”

“Come on.”

“ ‘Come on’ what?”

“You think our house is haunted? You think the ghosts of that murdered family are harassing you and breaking your china?” He shook his head. “Jesus. You sound like my mother.”

“Maybe she’s smarter than you give her credit for.”

“Even if she is, even if there are such things as ghosts, this house is safe because she purged it of evil spirits and she blesses it every time she walks through the goddamn door!”

“Keep your voice down. She’s in her room.”

“We’re not moving because you got a sudden attack of superstition.”

“It doesn’t bother you at all that people were murdered in the room we sleep in? In the rooms our kids sleep in? That doesn’t bother you at all?”

“It didn’t bother you until you found out about it.”

“It’s not as if we have all of our money tied up in this place. We—”

“All our money
is
tied up in this place. All our money for this year, at least. We’re not going to get another lottery payment until next August. So unless we can miraculously sell this house, which is pretty doubtful, considering its pedigree, we’re stuck here.”

She stared at him, blinked. “You knew,” she said. “You knew about this.”

“Paul and Odd told me. I thought it would be better if you didn’t know. I didn’t want to worry you.”

“What gives you the right to make that decision for me? Who are you to censor my information like I’m some goddamn child?”

“Why don’t you keep
your
voice down?” he said.

“It’s my house, and I’ll yell if I want to!”

“Where are the kids?”

“School,” she said, but she couldn’t help glancing at the clock. Three-ten. They’d be home in twenty minutes.

“Look, I admit it’s not the most comforting thought in the world, but we’re stuck here—for the short term, at least—and we’re going to have to make the best of it. I suggest we don’t tell the kids—”

“Of course we’re not going to tell the kids,” she snapped. “But since our family seems to be the only one in town that doesn’t know what happened here, I’m sure someone, sometime, will tell them.”

“And when they ask, we’ll explain that there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“Isn’t there?”

Gregory looked at her. “You honestly believe Bill Megan’s ghost is going to try to murder us in our sleep?”

“I don’t know what to believe.”

He wiped his forehead. “Jesus,” he sighed.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, I’m just a stupid little backward Molokan girl, huh? Let me remind you, mister, that
I’m
the one from L.A. You’re the one from Hicksville here. So don’t try to pull any more-sophisticated-than-thou crap on me.”

“Just shut up,” he said.

“What?” she demanded.

He turned away. “We’ll talk about this when you’re more rational.”

“We’ll talk about it now!”

“No,” he said levelly. “We won’t.”

“Fuck you!”

“Fuck you.”

“Go to hell!” she said, but he was already walking down the hallway toward the bathroom. She turned her back on him and stormed into the kitchen. She was shaking, with fury and frustration and some emotion she could not identify, and she poured herself a glass of water and sat down at the kitchen table, breathing deeply, drinking slowly, trying not to think about Gregory, trying not to think about the house or the murders, trying to calm down before the kids came home.

Sasha stood on the corner of Malachite Avenue, finishing her cigarette before turning onto her own street. She might be an adult, but she still didn’t want her parents to catch her. Her father would shit a brick if he ever caught her smoking, and while she wasn’t afraid to stand up to her parents, she didn’t want to go through all the hassle. It was better to avoid any conflict with the family and just pretend that things were going along the way they always had.

She took one last deep drag, then dropped the butt and ground it into the gravel with the toe of her shoe.

She popped a couple of Tic Tacs into her mouth and headed up the street toward home.

Adam assaulted her the moment she walked through the door. “What’s twelve base six?”

“What?”

“We’re doing base six in math. What’s twelve base six?”

Sasha pushed past him. “I don’t know.”

In the living room, her father put down his paper and looked coldly at her. “I thought I told you to be nice to your brother.”

“I am being nice. I just don’t know the answer to his question.”

“You were short, brusque, and rude. I told you before, you may be almost eighteen, but as long as you are living in this house I expect you to abide by our rules. I expect you to treat your family with decency and respect. And that includes Adam. Now I want you to help your brother with his homework.”

“Why don’t you help him, Father? Or don’t you know how?”

He stood up, his already red face growing livid. “I will not be spoken to that way in my own house!”

She thought he was going to hit her, and she stepped back, suddenly afraid. Neither of her parents had ever hit any of them before, aside from small slaps on the bottom when they were younger, and this new, threatening authoritarianism took her by surprise.

“You . . . help . . . Adam . . . with . . . his . . . homework,” her father said evenly.

Sasha glanced at her brother, and he seemed just as unnerved as she was.

That little shit Teo started laughing, but Sasha silenced her with a look.

“Do you understand me?” her father said.

“Yeah,” Sasha told him, but she did not stay around to prolong the discussion. She stomped up the stairs to her bedroom, half-expecting to hear her father’s footsteps following behind, but no one came after her, and she walked into the room and boldly slammed the door.

She threw her books on the bed. Everyone was acting fucking weird these days. Her father was all pissed off, her mother was all silent, Babunya seemed like she was getting ready to die. Everyone was freaked.

They should never have moved here.

She herself was behaving strangely—she certainly wasn’t the same person she had been back in California—but while she recognized that fact, she did not really care. She was happy with the new Sasha, happy with the way things were going, and if she
had
to live here in this dumpy little rathole of a town, at least she would do it on her own terms.

There was a tentative knock on her door, and she heard Adam’s voice. “Sasha?”

“Go away!” she said.

“You’re supposed to help me with—”

“Fuck off!” she yelled.

“You’re in trouble now.” Her brother’s footsteps receded down the short hallway and retreated down the stairs.

Sasha moved over to the door, locked it, then sat down on her bed.

And waited for her father.

The storm hit an hour out of Tucson.

Gregory had picked up replacement relays for the café’s soundboard at an electronics warehouse on the south side of the city, loaded them into the van, and headed immediately back toward McGuane, hoping to stay ahead of the weather, but the storm caught up to him just past the turnoff to Cochise Stronghold. There was only rain at first, and wind, but by the time he’d gotten off the interstate and was driving down the two-lane McGuane Highway, there were thunder and flashes of far-off lightning.

He sped up. Save for an occasional saguaro or paloverde tree, his vehicle was the tallest thing on this stretch of desert, and as he saw a jagged flash of lightning touch ground a couple of miles to his left, he increased his speed. The seconds between the increasingly deafening thunderclaps and the slashing blue-white bolts of lightning were steadily shrinking, and he wanted to make it to the mountains before the full force of the storm reached him.

Ordinarily, he would have been able to see for untold miles in every direction, but clouds and rain hemmed in the horizon, and though the lightning illuminated specific sections of desert, the land for the most part remained dark. Darkest of all was the highway before him, and though he knew the mountains were close, he could see nothing ahead save swaths of gray.

A whipcrack of thunder exploded nearby, so loud that it sounded as though a cannonball had shattered the van’s windows, and Gregory jumped, unintentionally swerving to the left. He saw no accompanying lightning, but his ears were still ringing and he knew that the hit had been close. The road was slick and dangerous, but he pushed the van up to eighty, wanting just to get out of this flat area before lightning hit the van.

Directly ahead and off to his left, a bolt of lightning so perfectly defined that it looked like it had been digitized by some Hollywood special-effects house hit a paloverde tree. The paloverde exploded, flying limbs on fire as they fell to the ground and bounced in the roadway. A deafening peal of thunder sounded at the precise instant of the hit, and it was the suddenness of the sound as much as anything else that caused Gregory to swerve out of the way and avoid the burning debris.

Then the cliffs were surrounding him and the highway was snaking through a canyon, into the mountains, and his van was no longer the tallest thing on the desert floor, no longer a moving target, and he slowed down as he rounded the second curve.

Already the thunder was fading, moving farther away, and ahead there were no flashes of lightning.

There were dark clouds over McGuane, but no rain, and when he pulled into town some twenty minutes later, the van’s windshield had already dried off and his heart rate was finally back to normal.

Gregory drove directly to the café, parking in the middle of the steep back alley. Paul was over in Safford, taking care of some personal business, and the café was empty save for a newly hired teenage busboy and a minimum-wage female clerk, who were standing with their heads together at one end of the counter. They jumped apart as if struck the second he entered the room, and he could not help smiling at their obvious guilt as he asked, “Where’s Odd?”

“Mr. Morrison went home,” the girl explained. “He told me to tell you to call him as soon as you got back.”

“Thanks.” Gregory walked into Paul’s office and dialed Odd’s number. He told the handyman he’d gotten the relays, and Odd promised to be by “in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

Gregory walked out and poured himself a cup of regular, straight coffee before going back and unloading the van. The clerk and busboy were now in entirely different parts of the café, she wiping down the counter and he sweeping out a windowed corner, and if Gregory had not known better he would have thought they did not even know each other.

Odd arrived soon after he finished unloading, and they got to work. They finished putting in the relays, then tested everything, running the lights and checking the sound system, Odd croaking out an old Jimmie Rogers song as they tried out the mikes. Everything worked, everything was in order, everything was ready to go, and as a few late-afternoon patrons trickled in, the two of them began putting away their tools.