It was obvious, of course, that Lanny McCoy was dead. When Lissy told his parents that story about him running off with Sylvie—how ludicrous to imagine even if Sylvie hadn’t been dead!—it could only mean one thing. Lissy knew that neither of them would ever be showing up to contradict her story. How did it play out? Did she tell Lanny what had happened, and then he got all these crazy ideas about going to the police and pleading self-defense? He could imagine him earnestly telling her, “She hit you with a rock, you had to defend yourself,” but Lissy would know that the prosecutor would have an expert testify that you had to hold onto the victim’s throat so, so, so long in order to strangle her. Strangling is never a crime of passion, the prosecutor would say. It’s a cold-hearted crime. It’s a crime of icy hate. So what could Lissy do? She lures Lanny somewhere, maybe even tells him she wants to show him the body, but they’re down in that gully maybe, and suddenly there’s a rock in her hand, a blow to his head.
Or maybe she never talked to him at all. She knew already that she couldn’t afford to have anyone else who knew about that tunnel. The body couldn’t be found until she was long gone. Lanny never got a choice. Because a woman like Lissy, she doesn’t love anybody. Lanny was good for sex and drugs. But expendable. So she went up to the kitchen and got a knife and was waiting for him when he arrived. For all Don knew, his body was farther down the tunnel.
Then she went to his parents and told them a story that would hold them for a while. A few days. Long enough to get away. Only instead of a few days, it held them for years. Because Lanny had never told them about the tunnel. And since the house was closed, why would they dream of looking there in the cellar? No, Lissy’s secret was safe in that old house. Until now.
He had to laugh at his own pretension. Until now? What a joke. Her secret was still safe. Sure, he could go to the police and tell them he found a body in the tunnel. But how could he possibly explain anything about it? Everything he knew, he learned from a ghost. The dead woman was not going to be acceptable as a witness. Nobody was going to take her deposition. So they’d have a body and no leads and that would be it. They probably wouldn’t even figure out who it was. Sylvie was never reported missing, except to the McCoys, and to them she was missing because she ran off with their son. The story of the body found in the basement could play for a day in the local paper and on the TV news—they’d find a way to sneak footage of that corpse onto the screen—but no one would ever make the connection. Or if they did, nothing would come of it. The trail was too cold.
Lissy actually went to Lanny’s parents and wept as she told them her lies. Cried as if her heart were breaking, when in fact she murdered the two people she was slandering. Don boiled with rage against her. This Lissy Yont—for sheer gall she topped even Don’s ex-wife when she testified how the baby couldn’t be Don’s because he only had sex with his secretaries at the office.
He got to Friendly Avenue and headed west, but instead of turning south into the College Hill area where the Bellamy house was, he drove on to the grocery store where he’d been making his phone calls. The huge new Harris Teeter—the local pundits were now calling it the Taj Ma-Teeter—had a pretty good deli. He went in and bought vast quantities of basic food. The soup of the day in a tub the size of a paint can. Another container of potato salad, another of fruit salad. Don remembered how much food could disappear when it was carried upstairs to Gladys. He had to talk to the Weird sisters, and so he needed a serious peace offering. He stopped in the bakery and bought a cheesecake. None of the food would be as good as what they made themselves—but if they were as weary and sick as Miz Judea or whoever it was said this morning, they’d be glad of the break from cooking.
Don pulled up in front of the carriagehouse instead of parking around the corner beside the Bellamy house. He got the bags of food out of the cab and carried them up to the porch.
It took even longer to get someone to answer the door this time. Naptime? Or both of them upstairs with Gladys, and now so feeble that getting down the stairs took forever? He wasn’t going to give up, though. He pounded on the door, he rang the doorbell over and over. Finally the door opened, and not a crack, either. Miz Evelyn stood there, haggard, stooped, her eyes bloodshot and angry enough to kill on the spot. “Who the hell do you think you are!” she demanded.
“I’m lunch,” he said, holding out the bags. “It’s only Harris Teeter deli stuff, but it’s edible and you didn’t have to cook it.”
“After what you done—”
“I didn’t believe you. I’m sorry now, but I just couldn’t believe in it then.”
Her face was the picture of scorn. “Fine to be a skeptic when other people pay the price for it.”
“Eat the food,” he said. “Get some rest. Please let me come back and talk to you.”
“Why, when it takes you two damn months to believe what you’re told?”
But she took the food. He offered to carry it to the kitchen for her, but her lip curled in disgust. He clearly wasn’t welcome in this house anymore.
“Can I come back later?” he asked.
“You can hang yourself for all I care,” she said. “In fact, there’s rope in the shed out back. Feel free.” She smacked the door with her butt and it closed in his face.
Couldn’t blame them. But despite her tough words, she had taken the food. And she knew that he believed them now. Sooner or later they’d let him come in and ask his questions.
Only when he got to the front door of his own house and Sylvie opened it wide for him, only then did he realize that he hadn’t bought any food for them.
Which was stupid. She didn’t need food. He was famished, after all of yesterday’s work and missing dinner besides. But he could grab something later. He sat down with Sylvie in the alcove and told her about his conversation with the McCoys. She reached the same conclusion he did. “Lissy killed him,” she said.
“She’s a nasty one all right,” said Don. “If you had any doubts about the moral difference between the two of you—”
“Yes,” said Sylvie. “She kills to cover her crime. I hide.”
“You hid to cover her crime.”
“Poor Lanny. He was an ass, but he might have grown out of it.”
“I realized something,” said Don. “A little fact about murder that you often overlook. It’s always somebody’s child who dies.”
“Not me,” said Sylvie. “I’m nobody’s child.”
He held her hand. You’re mine now, he was saying. Not my child, but mine. To miss you when you go, to look out for you, to hope you’ll be careful.
“I don’t know what to do, now, Sylvie,” he said. “I don’t know how to find her. I just can’t imagine Lissy is still living under her own name. She told her lies to the McCoys and then she took off. She could be anywhere. Any country.”
“So,” said Sylvie. “So we don’t find her.”
“But we have to,” said Don. “I don’t know how we can set things to rights without her.”
She stroked the wood of the bench. “So work awhile this afternoon. Maybe some idea will come to you.”
He shook his head. “I can’t work on the house anymore,” he said. “Not till I know what’s needed.”
She flinched. “Don, it’s the house that’s making me real. Keeping me alive.”
“But it’s killing the women next door.”
She looked at him searchingly. “Don?”
“Don’t ask me to do that, Sylvie,” he said. “Think what you’re asking. Those old ladies may be crotchety and strange but I can’t just forget them and finish the house and it kills them or enslaves them completely or . . . You’re solid now, Sylvie.”
She nodded. “I know, I wasn’t . . . I didn’t mean for you to forget them, I just . . . I can feel the hunger of the house.”
“So can they.”
“It wants you to go on. Can’t you feel it?”
He shook his head.
“Well that’s good,” she said. “You’re st
ill free, then.”
“I’ve got to find a way to set things right. Not to decide between the dead woman that I love and a couple of strange old ladies I like a lot.”
She giggled. “Did you ever think you’d say a phrase like ‘the dead woman that I love’?”
He stroked her neck, the part of her shoulder left bare by the neckline of the dress. “Nor did I ever think that the most beautiful woman I ever met would disappear if she ever went outdoors.”
“Strange times,” said Sylvie.
“Strange but good,” said Don.
“Good?”
“This is completely selfish of me, but if you hadn’t been killed in this house and trapped here and . . . you think a college graduate librarian would ever look at a man like me?”
She shook her head. “But then, think of the hard road you had to travel to bring you here.”
“Come to think of it,” said Don, “if our meeting and falling in love with each other—that is what happened, isn’t it?”
She nodded.
“Well if that was part of some cosmic plan, then I got to say that’s one hell of a lousy planner. Somebody should fire that guy.”
“Let’s be honest,” said Sylvie. “If we could undo the bad things—I wasn’t murdered, and you didn’t lose Nellie—and the price of doing that was that we never met each other and never loved each other . . .”
Don didn’t need to answer. They both knew that they’d do it in a hot second.
“That doesn’t mean this isn’t real,” said Sylvie. “Just because our lives might have gone another way. A better way. Doesn’t mean that we don’t love each other now. I mean, it did go this way, and we can’t trade this for that or that for this, so . . .”
She couldn’t figure out how to end what she was saying, so he kissed her and solved that one small problem. Anything that could be solved with a kiss, he could do that. Trouble was, it was a very small list of very minor problems.
“It’s Gladys who’ll know,” he said. “If anybody does. She had the power to get those old ladies out of here. To keep them out this long. If there’s any way to keep you alive but get you out of this house . . .”
“There isn’t,” said Sylvie. “She couldn’t even get those ladies farther than the carriagehouse. What can she do for me?”
“Hey, it’s just a lot of old wives’ tales, right?” said Don. “But I’ll tell you, everything they told me has turned out to be right. I’m not going to make the mistake of underestimating any of those old wives.”
“Think they’ve finished the food you brought them?” asked Sylvie.
“You had to remind me of food.”
“So go eat,” she said. “And when you come back, see if they’ll let you in and give you some answers. Even if the answer is that there’s nothing you can do for me, at least we’ll know.”
He paused at the door. “Do you really think God has anything to do with this?” he asked.
She shrugged.
“I mean religion is all about life after death and right and wrong, right?”
“I guess we know there’s a life after death,” she said.
“But the will of God and all that,” said Don. “I just don’t see how the will of God could possibly have anything to do with this.”
“I don’t know, Don. I wasn’t a believer.”
“I was raised that way, but when Nellie died I decided that was all the proof I needed that God didn’t exist or if he did then he didn’t care about us at all.” Even saying this much about Nellie brought tears to his eyes and he had to swallow hard. “But now here you are. Here you are. A spirit, alive when your body’s dead. So where does God come into it? Is he out there somewhere, working to make it so that in the long run, the really really lo-o-o-ong run, everything comes out even?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I mean, maybe he’s out there.” She walked to him, touched his chest, right over his breastbone, right over his heart. “But maybe he’s in there. Making it all come out right.”
Don shook his head. “I don’t think God is in there.” He lifted her hand from his chest and kissed it. “But you are.”
He went out to the car and his legs felt loose and rubbery under him. He was a little dizzy. Either he was very hungry or he was in love. A quarter pounder with cheese would settle the question.
19
Answers
If the idea was to make up with the Weird sisters, Don still had a ways to go. And the start would be that leaf-covered lawn.
Their garage contained no car. Instead, it had the cleanest array of gardening tools Don had ever seen. What did they do, wash them in dish soap after each use? Every tool had a shelf of its own or a clip to hold it to the wall. Nothing touched the ground. The only sign that they had not been maintaining the garage up to their normal standards was a couple of spiderwebs, but these were so new they didn’t even have sacs of eggs or more than a couple of bug corpses. If these ladies had stayed in the Bellamy house, the place would never have decayed at all.
The rake was clipped to the wall. Don took it down and toted it over his shoulder out to the front yard. His body didn’t like raking, not today, not after yesterday’s labors, but he pushed on and after a while the aches and pains subsided and became the trance of labor. His hands were already callused. It felt good to him, to know that work had shaped his body. Back when he was a general contractor, building house after house, real physical labor had been only a hobby for him, fine carpentry in the garage. He had no calluses then. The last few years before his wife left, he had even been developing a little pooch at the beltline. That was gone, too. He didn’t have the shaped, constructed muscles of a bodybuilder. He had the body that honest labor made, and he had learned to recognize it in other men, and respect it. And to like his own. He felt good in this flesh.
The job was done. The leaves were piled at the curb. He leaned for a moment on the rake, and the front door opened. Not just a crack, and not just to be slammed in his face. Miz Judea and Miz Evelyn both stood there, waiting for him. He waved. “Got to put the rake away.” They closed the door as he walked around the house to the garage in the backyard.
Unsure how they went about making their tools so perfectly clean, Don contented himself with picking all the leaves off the rake before putting it back into its clip. He used that small handful of leaves to swipe at the spiderwebs and clear them away. Then he tossed the leaves over the high hedge into his own yard. Plenty of room for spiders there. They didn’t need to go disturbing the perfection of the Weird sisters’ garage.
The back door stood ajar, waiting for him.
He went inside. Miz Judea, looking weary and ancient, was slowly washing the plastic containers that had contained the food Don brought for them. “Was it good?” he asked her.
She just looked at him sadly and went back to washing.
Miz Evelyn came in from the parlor, carrying a plate of cookies. “I had this set out for you in the parlor, but then I remembered you didn’t like going in there when you were dirty from work.” It broke Don’s heart to see her walking like an old woman, one step at a time, balancing the plate in one hand.
“Oh, ladies,” he said. “I’m so sorry I’ve put you through all this.”
Miz Evelyn shook her head. “All began before you were born.”
At the sink, Miz Judea began to hum a melody that Don didn’t recognize. At first he wondered why she was singing this song at this point in the conversation; then he realized that she wasn’t paying attention to their conversation at all. She was humming because she felt like it.
“Thank you so much for raking our leaves,” said Miz Evelyn.
“I had an ulterior motive.”
“Oh, and for the lunch, too. But Gladys liked it. She misses store-bought food. Can you believe it?”
“Too much vinegar in everything,” said Miz Judea. So she was listening.
“Maybe that’s how they keep it from going bad in the display case,” said Do
n.
“Maybe they don’t know how to cook,” said Miz Judea. “Gladys wouldn’t know a good meal if it bit her on the butt.”
“Now, Miz Judy, don’t go talking down your dear cousin,” said Miz Evelyn.
“Hungry bitch,” said Miz Judea.
“It’s the house that’s hungry, Miz Judy, and you know it.”
Miz Judea nodded. “I’m tired.”
Miz Evelyn turned to Don to explain. “The house is so strong now.”
“I wake up dreaming about it,” said Miz Judea. “Five times a night. Dreamed there was a ball there. Saw you dancing, young man. With a heron.”
“A what?” asked Don.
“A heron. Long-legged bird.”
“It wasn’t a heron,” said Don.
“Whose dream we talking about, boy?” she demanded.
“I thought it wasn’t a dream,” said Don. “Because I was dancing there this morning. Until dawn.”
“You too lonely, boy,” said Miz Judea.
“You wasn’t dancing alone, I take it,” said Miz Evelyn.
“No, not alone,” said Don.
“Who you got over there?” asked Miz Evelyn.
“She was there when I arrived. A girl. A woman.”
Miz Judea looked skeptical. “Gladys never said nothing about no woman there.”
“She’s not a . . . her body was left in a tunnel under the back yard. About ten years ago.”
“Good Lord,” said Miz Evelyn. “You telling us she’s a haint?”
Don nodded. “She gets stronger along with the house. I didn’t understand any of what you told me. But the more I worked on the house, the more solid she became. Until I could feel her in my arms as we danced. But she’s only real inside the house.”
“You expect us to believe this bullshit?” asked Miz Judea.
“Hush, you silly old goose,” said Miz Evelyn. To Don she said, “She’s only trying to get even with you for not believing us earlier.”
“I don’t blame her,” said Don.
“Well who the hell else you going to blame?” asked Miz Evelyn. “We may be old and feeble and going through a hard time, but we’re still responsible for what we say, I hope! I ain’t ready for them boys in white coats, I can tell you that.”