A Soft Barren Aftershock

“Look,” he told Grimes, “why don’t you check at the nurses’ desk and find out where they lived. Get over there and dig up some background.”

  Grimes nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, sir.”

  Burke turned back to the room. Three lives had ended in there this morning. He was going to have to find out what those lives had been until now if he was ever going to understand this horror. And when he did get all the facts, could he ever really understand? Did he really want to?

  Hot, sweaty, and gritty, Jerry Pritchard hauled himself up the cellar stairs and into the kitchen. Grabbing a beer from the fridge, he popped the top and drained half the can in one long, gullet-cooling swallow. Lord, that was good! He stepped over to the back door and pressed his face against the screen in search of a vagrant puff of air, anything to cool him off.

  “Spring cleaning,” he muttered, looking out at the greening rear acreage. “Right.” It felt like August. Who ever heard of eighty degrees in April?

  He could almost see the grass growing. The weeds, too. That meant he’d probably be out riding the mower around next week. Old Lady Gati had kept him busy all fall getting the grounds perfectly manicured; the winter had been spent painting and patching the first and second floors; April had been designated basement clean-up time, and now the grounds needed to be whipped into shape again.

  An endless cycle. Jerry smiled. But that cycle meant job security. And job security meant he could work and eat here during the day and sleep in the gatehouse at night, and never go home again.

  He drained the can and gave it a be-hind-the-back flip into the brown paper bag sitting in the corner by the fridge.

  Home . . . the thought pursued him. There had been times when he thought he’d never get out. Twenty-two years in that little house, the last six of them pure hell after Dad got killed in the cave-in of No. 8 mine. Mom went off the deep end then. She had always been super religious, herding everyone along to fire-and-brimstone Sunday prayer meetings and making them listen to Bible readings every night. Dad had kept her in check somewhat, but once he was gone, all the stops were out. She began hounding him about how her only son should join the ministry and spread the Word of God. She submerged him in a Bible-besotted life for those years, and he’d almost bought the package. She had him consulting the Book upon awakening, upon retiring, before eating, before going off to school, before buying a pair of socks, before taking a leak, until common sense got a hold of him and he realized he was going slowly mad. But he couldn’t leave because he was the man of the house and there was his younger sister to think of.

  But Suzie, bless her, ran off last summer at sixteen and got married. Jerry walked out a week later. Mom had the house, Dad’s pension, her Bible, and an endless round of prayer meetings. Jerry stopped by once in a while and sent her a little money when he could. She seemed to be content.

  Whatever makes you happy, he thought. He had taken his own personal Bible with him when he left. It was still in his suitcase in the gatehouse. Some things you just didn’t throw away, even if you stopped using them.

  The latest in a string of live-in maids swung through the kitchen door with old lady Gati’s lunch dishes on a tray. None of the others had been bad looking, but this girl was a knockout. “Hey, Steph,” he said, deciding to put off his return to the cellar just a little bit longer. “How’s the Dragon Lady treating you?”

  She flashed him a bright smile. “I don’t know why you call her that, Jerry. She’s really very sweet.”

  That’s what they all say, he thought, and then wham! they’re out. Stephanie Watson had been here almost six weeks—a record in Jerry’s experience. Old lady Gati went through maids like someone with hayfever went through Kleenex. Maybe Steph had whatever it was old lady Gati was looking for.

  Jerry hoped so. He liked her. Liked her a lot. Liked her short tawny hair and the slightly crooked teeth that made her easy smile seem so genuine, liked her long legs and the way she moved through this big old house with such natural grace, like she belonged here. He especially liked the way her blue flowered print shift clung to her breasts and stretched across her buttocks as she loaded the dishes into the dishwasher. She excited him, no doubt about that.

  “You know,” she said, turning toward him and leaning back against the kitchen counter, “I still can’t get over the size of this place. Seems every other day I find a new room.”

  Jerry nodded, remembering his first few weeks here last September. The sheer height of this old three-story gothic mansion had awed him as he had come through the gate to apply for the caretaker job. He had known it was big—everybody in the valley grew up within sight of the old Gati House on the hill—but had never been close enough to appreciate how big. The house didn’t really fit with the rest of the valley. It wasn’t all that difficult to imagine that a giant hand had plucked it from a far-away, more populated place and dropped it here by mistake. But the older folks in town still talked about all the trouble and expense mine-owner Karl Gati went through to have it built.

  “Yeah,” he said, looking at his calloused hands. “It’s big all right.”

  He watched her for a moment as she turned and rinsed out the sink, watched the way her blond hair moved back and forth across the nape of her neck. He fought the urge to slip his arms around her and kiss that neck. That might be a mistake. They had been dating since she arrived here—just movies and something to eat afterwards—and she had been successful so far in holding him off. Not that that was so hard to do. Growing up under Mom’s watchful Pentecostal eye had prevented him from developing a smooth approach to the opposite sex. So far, his limited repertoire of moves hadn’t been successful with Steph.

  He was sure she wasn’t a dumb innocent—she was a farm girl and certainly knew what went where and why. No, he sensed that she was as attracted to him as he to her but didn’t want to be a pushover. Well, okay. Jerry wasn’t sure why that didn’t bother him too much. Maybe it was because there was something open and vulnerable about Steph that appealed to a protective instinct in him. He’d give her time. Plenty of it. Something inside him told him she was worth the wait. And something else told him that she was weakening, that maybe it wouldn’t be too long now before . . .

  “Well, it’s Friday,” he said, moving closer. “Want to go down to town tonight and see what’s playing at the Strand?” He hated to sound like a broken record—movie-movie-movie—but what else was there to do in this county on weekends if you didn’t get drunk, play pool, race cars, or watch TV?

  Her face brightened with another smile. “Love it!”

  Now why, he asked himself, should a little smile and a simple yes make me feel so damn good?

  No doubt about it. She did something to him.

  “Great! I’ll—”

  A deep, gutteral woman’s voice interrupted him. “Young Pritchard! I wish to see you a moment!”

  Jerry shuddered. He hated what her accent did to the r’s in his name. Setting his teeth, he followed the sound of her voice through the ornate, cluttered dining room with its huge needlepoint carpet and bronze chandeliers and heavy furniture. Whoever had decorated this house must have been awfully depressed. Everything was dark and gloomy. All the furniture and decorations seemed to end in points.

  He came to the semi-circular solarium where she awaited him. Her wheelchair was in its usual position by the big bay windows where she could look out on the rolling expanse of the south lawn.

  “Ah, there you are, young Pritchard,” she said, looking up and smiling coyly. She closed the book in her hands and laid it on the blanket that covered what might have passed for legs in a nightmare. The blanket had slipped once and he had seen what was under there. He didn’t want another look. Ever. He remembered what his mother had always said about deformed people: That they were marked by God and should be avoided.

  Old lady Gati was in her mid-sixties maybe, flabby without being fat, with pinched features and graying hair stretched back into a severe little bun at the back of her head. Her e
yes were a watery blue as she looked at him over the tops of her reading glasses.

  Jerry halted about a dozen feet away but she motioned him closer. He pretended not to notice. She was going to want to touch him again. God, he couldn’t stand this!

  “You called, ma’am?”

  “Don’t stand so far away, young Pritchard.” He advanced two steps in her direction and stopped again. “Closer,” she said. “You don’t expect me to shout, do you?”

  She didn’t let up until he was standing right next to her. Except for these daily chats with Miss Gati, Jerry loved his job.

  “There,” she said. “That’s better. Now we can talk more easily.”

  She placed a gnarled, wrinkled hand on his arm and Jerry’s flesh began to crawl. Why did she always have to touch him?

  “The basement—it is coming along well?”

  “Fine,” he said, looking at the floor, out the window, anywhere but at her hungry, smiling face. “Just fine.”

  “Good.” She began stroking his arm, gently, possessively. “I hope this heat wave isn’t too much for you.” As she spoke she used her free hand to adjust the blanket over what there was of her lower body. “I really should have Stephanie get me a lighter blanket.”

  Jerry fought the urge to jump away from her. He had become adept at masking the revulsion that rippled through his body every time she touched him. And it seemed she had to touch him whenever he was in reach. When he first got the caretaker job, he took a lot of ribbing from the guys in town down at the Dewkum Inn. (Lord, what Mom would say if she ever saw him standing at a bar!) Everybody knew that a lot of older, more experienced men had been passed over for him. His buddies had said that the old lady really wanted him for stud service. The thought nauseated him. Who knew if she even had—

  No, that would never happen. He needed this job, but there was nothing he needed that badly. And so far, all she had ever done was stroke his arm when she spoke to him. Even that was hard to take.

  As casually as he could, he moved out of reach and gazed out the window as if something on the lawn had attracted his attention. “What did you want me to—”

  Stephanie walked into the room and interrupted him.

  “Yes, Miss Gati?”

  “Get me a summer blanket, will you, dear?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” She flashed a little smile at Jerry as she turned, and he watched her until she was out of sight. Now if only it were Steph who couldn’t keep her hands off him, he wouldn’t—

  “She appeals to you, young Pritchard?” Miss Gati said, her eyes dancing.

  He didn’t like her tone, so he kept his neutral. “She’s a good kid.”

  “But does she appeal to you?”

  He felt his anger rising, felt like telling her it was none of her damn business, but he hauled it back and said, “Why is that so important to you?”

  “Now, now, young Pritchard, I’m only concerned that the two of you get along well. But not too well. I don’t want you taking little Stephie away from me. I have special needs, and as you know, it took me a long time to find a live-in maid with Stephie’s special qualities.”

  Jerry couldn’t quite buy that explanation. There had been something in her eyes when she spoke of Steph “appealing” to him, a hint that her interest went beyond mere household harmony.

  “But the reason I called you here,” she said, shifting the subject, “is to tell you that I want you to tend to the roof in the next few days.”

  “The new shingles came in?”

  “Yes. Delivered this morning while you were in the basement. I want you to replace the worn ones over my room tomorrow. I fear this heat wave might bring us a storm out of season. I don’t want my good furniture ruined by leaking water.”

  He guessed he could handle that. “Okay. I’ll finish up today and be up on the roof tomorrow. How’s that?”

  She wheeled over and cut him off as he tried to make his getaway. “Whatever you think best, young Pritchard.”

  Jerry pulled free and hurried off, shuddering.

  Marta Gati watched young Pritchard’s swift exit.

  I repulse him.

  There was no sorrow, no self-pity attached to the thought. When you were born with twig-like vestigial appendages for legs and only half a pelvis, you quickly became used to rejection—you learned to read it in the posture, to sense it behind the eyes. Your feelings soon became as callused as a miner’s hands.

  He’s sensitive about my little Stephie, she thought. Almost protective. He likes her. He’s attracted to her. Very attracted.

  That was good. She wanted young Pritchard to have genuine feelings for Stephie. That would make it so much better.

  Yes, her little household was just the way she wanted it now. It had taken her almost a year to set it up this way. Month after month of trial and error until she found the right combination. And now she had it.

  Such an arrangement would have been impossible while Karl was alive. Her brother would never have hired someone with as little experience as young Pritchard as caretaker, and he would have thought Stephie too young and too frail to be a good live-in maid. But Karl was dead now. The heart attack had taken him quickly and without warning last June. He had gone to bed early one night complaining of what he thought was indigestion, and never awoke. Marta Gati missed her brother and mourned his loss, yet she was reveling in the freedom his passing had left her.

  Karl had been a good brother. Tyrannically good. He had looked after her as a devoted husband would an ailing wife. He had never married, for he knew that congenital defects ran high in their family. Out of their parents’ four children, two—Marta and Gabor—had been horribly deformed. When they had come to America from Hungary, Karl invested the smuggled family fortune in the mines here and, against all odds, had done well. He saw to it that Lazlo, the younger brother, received the finest education. Lazlo now lived in New York where he tended to Gabor.

  And Marta? Marta he had kept hidden away in this remote mansion in rural West Virginia where she had often thought she would go insane with boredom. At least he had been able to persuade him to decorate the place. If she had to stay here, she had a right to be caged in surroundings to her taste. And her taste was Gothic Revival.

  Marta loved this house, loved the heavy wood of the tables, the carved deer legs of the chairs, the elaborate finials atop the cabinets, the ornate valances and radiator covers, the trefoil arches on her canopy bed.

  But the decor could only carry one so far. And there were only so many books one could read, television shows and rented movies one could watch. Karl’s conversational capacity had been limited in the extreme, and when he had spoken, it was on business and finance and little else. Marta had wanted to be out in the world, but Karl said the world would turn away from her, so he’d kept her here to protect her from hurt.

  But Marta had found a way to sneak out from under his overprotective thumb. And now with Karl gone, she no longer had to sneak out to the world. She could bring some of the world into the house. Yes, it was going to be so nice here.

  “Tell me something,” Steph said as she rested her head on Jerry’s shoulder. She was warm against him in the front seat of his old Fairlane 500 convertible and his desire for her was a throbbing ache. After the movie—a Burt-Reynolds-type carchase flick, but without Burt Reynolds—he had driven them back here and parked outside the gatehouse. The top was down and they were snuggled together in the front seat watching the little stars that city people never see, even on the clearest of nights.

  “Anything,” he whispered into her hair.

  “How did Miss Gati get along here before she had me?”

  “A lady from town used to come in to clean and cook, but she never stayed over. You’re the first live-in who’s lasted more than a week since I’ve been working here. The old lady’s been real choosy about finding someone after the last live-in . . . left.”

  Jerry decided that now was not the time to bring up the last maid’s suicide. Steph was f
rom the farmlands on the other side of the ridge and wouldn’t know about her. Constance Granger had been her name, a quiet girl who went crazy wild. She had come from a decent, church-going family, but all of a sudden she became a regular at the roadside taverns, taking up with a different man every night. Then one night she became hysterical in a motel room—with two men, if the whispers could be believed—and began screaming at the top of her lungs. She ran out of the room jaybird naked and got hit by a truck.

  Jerry didn’t want to frighten Steph with that kind of story, not now while they were snug and close like this. He steered the talk elsewhere.

  “Now you tell me something. What do you think of working for old lady Gati?”

  “She’s sweet. She’s not a slave driver and the pay is good. This is my first job since leaving home and I guess I’m kinda lucky it’s working out so well.”

  “You miss home?”

  He felt her tense beside him. She never talked about her home. “No. I . . . didn’t get along with my father. But I get along just fine with Miss Gati. The only bad thing about the job is the house. I gives me the creeps. I get nightmares every night.”

  “What about?”

  She snuggled closer, as if chilled despite the warmth of the night. “I don’t remember much by morning, all I know is that they’re no fun. I don’t know how Miss Gati lived here alone after the last maid left. Especially without any legs. I’d be frightened to death!”

  “She’s not. She tried out girl after girl. No one satisfied her till you came along. She’s a tough one.”

  “But she’s not. She’s nice. A real lady. You know, I make her hot chocolate every night and she insists I sit down and have a cup with her while she tells me about her family and how they lived in ‘the Old Country.’ Isn’t that nice?”

  “Just super,” Jerry said.

  He lifted her chin and kissed her. He felt her respond, felt her catch some of the fervor running through him like fire. He let his hand slip off her shoulder and come to rest over her right breast. She made no move to push him away as his fingers began caressing her.