Randa stared at Tillie’s breakfast menu through unfocused eyes, the result of a hangover that rivaled anything she’d ever done to herself at a freshman mixer, and tried to remember why it had seemed like a good idea to stay and have two and a half more drinks last night after Jack had stormed out.
Could it possibly be because you apparently had an in-depth conversation with a ghost?
I did not have a conversation with a ghost. There are a million logical explanations.
Name one.
Maybe it was someone pretending to be Ryland. Cam had a respectable amount of money and, as far as anyone knew, no locatable next of kin.
The man you saw was the man in Cam’s scrapbook, and you know it.
Maybe Ryland isn’t really dead. Maybe Jack lied.
Why would he lie?
Well, Cam seems to have lied to me all over the place. Maybe they’re a family of pathological liars. They’re certainly a family of pathological somethings.
The breakfast crowd had not paid her a lot of attention, with the exception of the occasional scowl she was getting from the little old woman who owned the guesthouse she had checked into upon discovering she was too drunk to drive to Atlanta.
She looked out the window and was just beginning to worry about the possibility of Jack showing up when she saw him, a blur of old denim, making his way up the highway, his hands in his pockets. He was walking briskly, as if he was late for an appointment. Barely checking for traffic, he half ran across the road. He came through the door and headed straight for her booth, sliding into the seat across from her like she’d been waiting for him.
“I called every hotel in town looking for you.” This was a long way from what she’d expected; it took a Herculean effort to conceal that fact.
“Why?”
“I want to talk to you.”
“You could have fooled me last night.”
“Will you just hear me out?”
“Why, certainly. You were so patient with me, the least I can do is return the favor.”
“Let me know when you’ve gotten all this out of your system,” he said without emotion. He was untouchable behind the fortress of that blank expression, and he knew it. She wanted to kick him.
“Okay,” she said. “What is it?”
“I need to know the truth.”
“About what?”
“What you said, about talking to Ryland. I have to know if that really happened.”
“How could it have happened? You said Ryland’s been dead for years.”
“Forget that. Let me worry about it.”
The redheaded waitress appeared, Bic poised above her guest check.
“What can I get y’all?”
“Coffee. Black,” Randa answered mechanically.
“Two,” Jack added.
The waitress pocketed the guest check, took Randa’s menu (while giving her a stern once-over), and was gone.
“The guy who said he was Ryland. Where did you see him?”
“Cam’s living room. He said I should find you and give you the books. I asked him why he couldn’t do it himself. He said he couldn’t get through your thick skull.” She paused for effect, then added, “Whatever could he have meant by that?”
Jack remained stoic. “So what was it that a total stranger was supposed to be able to get through my thick skull?”
“He seemed to think you were in some kind of trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“I don’t know. He wasn’t making a lot of sense. But then, the poor guy’s been dead for three years; I guess I shouldn’t pick on his syntax.”
The waitress returned with two mugs of coffee.
“Are y’all sure you don’t want breakfast?” It was aimed at Jack. Randa had a sneaking suspicion the girl had a greater interest in eavesdropping on their conversation than any genuine concern over Jack’s nutritional needs. He looked at her, annoyed.
“Hadn’t you better stop talking to me, before you get Darlene all upset again?”
Her face turned sheepish, so Randa assumed Jack had hit a nerve. Whatever he’d done, it had worked. She was gone. Jack turned back to Randa.
“How can I know?” he asked.
“Know what?”
“That you’re not just trying to trick me into something.”
“Oh, come on. Are we going to do that one again?” It came out louder than she’d meant it to, and Randa was drawing stares, but she was too annoyed to care. “Look, if I wanted to write some tabloid exposé on your sacred family, I would have done it a long time ago and I wouldn’t have needed you. Cam’s followers will have a new messiah by the time I get home, so a story about his childhood wouldn’t even be an easy sell, much less a hot property. And in case you haven’t noticed, this country has been executing people at far too rapid a rate for anyone to give a damn about Tallen anymore. So if I’m trying to trick you into a story, you tell me what the hell story I’m trying to trick you into.”
He was quiet for a long moment, staring into his coffee. When he finally spoke, he didn’t look up. “Then why are you here?”
“I don’t know. The man who said he was Ryland told me that I’d do this if I cared anything about your family.”
“Why do you care about my family?”
“Apparently I have a pathological obsession with them, if you want the unsolicited opinion of your late brother’s most recent girlfriend.”
He looked at her, startled out of his shell. “I thought you were . . . I mean, I assumed . . .”
Randa shook her head. “Nope. My stint as Playmate of the Year was cut down in its prime by one Nora Dixon, formerly my closest and most trustworthy friend.”
“Cam ditched you for your best friend?” He seemed mildly amused by that.
“Well, from what I heard, Nora wasn’t exactly a passive participant. And I’m the idiot who introduced them, so it’s hard to come up with a blameless party in the mix.” She didn’t know why she was telling him any of this. It was none of his damned business. “I don’t have an answer. My current theory is that I was very bad in another lifetime, and for punishment, God has made me obsess over your family.”
He smiled. He actually smiled. It took years off his face, and the hardness was replaced by something close to warmth.
“Well, whatever you did, I must have done something worse. At least you didn’t have to grow up with them.”
He sounded like Cam when he said it, down to the tiniest inflection. It made Randa wince. She was grateful when he didn’t seem to notice.
“I don’t get it. If Ryland’s still alive, why wouldn’t he just come to me?” The smile was gone as quickly as it had appeared.
“Is it possible that Ryland’s still alive?”
“I guess so, technically. I didn’t go to the funeral. Mainly because he’d been dead for a year before my aunt bothered to tell me.”
“Why would she tell you he was dead if it wasn’t true?”
“I don’t know.” He sipped his coffee and stared out the window. “Nothing in my life has ever made sense.” He hesitated, then looked back at her.
“The reason I wanted to talk to you”—he paused and took a breath—“I know how crazy this sounds, but last night when I got home, there was a message on my answering machine from Tallen.”
Randa stared at him, waiting for him to explain. He didn’t. “You’re serious?” she finally asked.
“It’s not something I’d joke about.”
Randa remembered Cam’s claim that he’d seen Tallen, and she had to work to suppress a shudder. “Are you sure it was Tallen?” she asked.
“It was Tallen’s voice,” he said. “You probably wouldn’t have any trouble convincing me that I’m losing my mind, but I know Tallen’s voice.” He choked on the words and stopped, stared down into his coffee cup. “It was him,” he said, quietly, to no one.
“Well . . . did he . . .”
Did he what, Randa? Leave a number where he could be reached?
She tried again. “What did the message say?”
“That you were telling me the truth.”
So his ghost believed that she saw her ghost. That helped.
“Do you still have the tape?”
“There’s nothing on it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I rewound it, and there’s nothing on it,” he said. “Look, it’s probably just—my mother was batshit crazy when she died. My father was not even human, and Tallen had to have been at least temporarily insane to do what he did, I don’t care what the jury said. And if even Cam could lose it, there’s no reason to think I’m somehow exempt.” He sighed. “I’ve been coming unglued lately. I’ve been having these migraines, one right after another. It keeps me disoriented. And these dreams . . . I can’t even describe them. They’re unreal. I mean, even for dreams. It’s like . . .” He groped for a word.
“Like you’re going somewhere in your sleep?”
His face tensed with disbelief and went ashen. “How do you know?” he asked in a tight whisper.
“Cam was having weird dreams, too. That’s how he described them to someone.”
“That’s exactly how it feels,” he said, still half-whispering. He put his coffee cup down and shoved it aside.
“Was there something your family referred to as ‘the thing’?” Randa asked. “That’s what Ryland was saying. He said, ‘Tell him that the thing is real.’ ”
Jack froze. He looked numb, like someone who had heard one too many bits of bad news.
“Are you okay?”
He stood up. “Let’s get out of here.”
Before she could answer he was up, on his way to the door. Randa signaled the waitress for the check.
She found him outside, pacing in front of her car. Randa wondered what land mine she’d stepped on this time.
“Where are we going?” she asked, bracing herself for whatever came back at her.
“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I just . . . couldn’t breathe in there.” He took a few steps away from the car, stopped, and stared down the road.
Randa had a sudden idea. “Could I see the house?” she asked. He looked back at her.
“The house?”
“Your family’s house. Is it near here?”
He nodded. “About five miles down Thirty-Six.”
“I’d really love to see it,” she said. She was surprised by her brazenness, but none of this felt real anyway. She was sure that any minute she’d wake up, Cam and Nora would be announcing their engagement, and she’d be working on a story about where to find the best soft tacos in the San Fernando Valley.
“Well . . . okay,” Jack said. “I guess we could go there.”
Randa unlocked the car door quickly, before he changed his mind.
As was usually the case anywhere in Georgia, as soon as they left the town, they were in the boondocks. They rode in silence. Jack stared out the window, but Randa doubted he really saw anything.
The two-lane wound them through the gentle landscape. Rolling hills dotted with grazing cattle; miles of pastures bordered by tall Georgia pines and huge old oak trees. Randa had forgotten how beautiful it was, and how deceptively peaceful.
“What do you know about me?” Jack asked suddenly.
“Not much,” Randa said. She wondered why he was asking. He didn’t say anything else.
“I know you’ve done time,” she said. “Cam told me.”
“I’m sure he did,” Jack said. He had no attitude that she could pinpoint.
“He didn’t tell me what for.”
“Overdue library books,” Jack said without smiling. Randa glanced at him. She thought she could detect the tiniest trace of a smirk.
“What was it really?”
“Armed robbery.”
Randa was stumped for a response.
How interesting. I’ve never driven down a deserted country road with an armed robber before.
“Don’t worry,” he said, breaking the silence. “I gave that up.” He pointed at something up ahead. “Turn left at those mailboxes.”
She turned. There were pastures on either side of the gravel road, enclosed in barbed-wire fencing. In the pasture on the right, a herd of white-faced Herefords were all lying down, feet tucked neatly under their bellies, watching the car with great indifference.
“Guy down the road owns the cows,” Jack offered. “He tends the fence, fertilizes and Bush Hogs the pasture, in return for running his cattle on the land.”
“This is your land? All of it?”
“It’s not that much. Forty-five acres.”
“Where’s the house?”
“Other side of those trees. It’s about half a mile off the road.”
“How on earth did your father afford this?”
“He didn’t. Ryland paid for it. My mother had this stupid theory that my father would settle down if they had their own home, so she talked Ryland into buying this place for us. It went cheap. No one around here wanted it.”
“Why not?”
“Family who lived here right before we bought it . . . guy went nuts one night and took an ax to his wife and three kids, then shot himself. Nobody was in a big mood to live here after that.”
“I’m surprised your mother would.”
“What my mother wanted more than anything else was a permanent address. I guess that won out over potential ghosts.”
“Did anything weird ever happen?”
“If I ever heard anything go bump in the night, it was generally my father slamming my mother’s head against the wall.”
The road curved and suddenly the house was in sight.
There was nothing about it that offered any hint of its ugly past. It was the standard white clapboard story-and-a-half farmhouse with a front porch, the roof of which was supported by concrete and brick pillars. The place wasn’t immaculate, but it wasn’t in a state of disrepair, either. The only thing that would even verge on gothic was the fact that it was so isolated. It was impossible to see the road from the house, and empty fields stretched out beyond it on all sides. Will must have loved that—plenty of room to wreak havoc on Lucy and the kids, and no one within miles to hear anything and call the cops.
“Forgive the obvious question, but why don’t you live here?” Randa asked, as they emerged from the car.
“Too many bad memories, I guess. As trite as that must sound.”
“Then why don’t you sell it?”
“Partly because I don’t want to deal with all that.”
“What’s the other part?”
“I have this fantasy of striking a match to it.” He didn’t smile when he said it. “Burn it to the ground, just sit here and watch.”
“So why haven’t you?”
“I guess some other part of me needs proof that it all really happened.”
He nodded toward a small barn a few yards away. “I’m going to get something for the ducks.” He was gone, disappearing inside. Randa looked around, wondering what ducks he was talking about. He returned with a small red plastic bucket full of dried corn.
“You don’t mind walking, do you?”
She shook her head and followed him. It was chilly, but the quiet was intoxicating, worth any discomfort. The sky was gray from the storm front that had not quite moved on, and it gave the place a touch of the ominous atmosphere it deserved. Jack led her up a hill, down a shallow valley, and up over a ridge, beyond which lay a small lake. The silence was broken by a frenzy of quacking from the half dozen mallards on the lake, who had seen them coming. Randa smiled. Ducks always seemed like cartoon animals to her. Cute, but surely not meant to be taken seriously. Jack reached into the bucket and tossed a handful of corn to the shoreline. The ducks waddled out of the water and all dove after the same kernel, not noticing that the ground was yellow-speckled all around them.
Randa watched Jack watching the ducks. No matter how he felt about the house, he and the land suited each other nicely. It was the first place she had seen him look as if he belonged. He seemed almost calm.
He tossed the ducks another handful of corn, then put the bucket down on the ground and sat beside it. She didn’t know whether she was supposed to join him or not. She sat, careful not to get too close. He didn’t even seem to notice.
“So are you going to tell me what ‘the thing’ is?” she asked, as gently as possible.
He nodded slightly and stared at the ducks for a moment before speaking. When he did, his tone was matter-of-fact.
“My mother had this theory that there was a curse on our family,” he said.
“Was this theory based on anything?”
“A seventy-five-cent fortune-teller she saw at a county fair when she was nineteen years old.” He smiled, remembering.
“Do I get to hear the story?” Randa asked.
“Sure, why not? My parents had been married for about a year and they were still living somewhere down near Savannah, where my mother grew up. One night, while my father was out somewhere getting drunk, my mother and her best friend, Bird, decided to go to the fair that was in town. So they went, they rode rides, played bingo, all that stuff. Just as they were leaving, they saw this cheesy fortune-teller’s tent, so they decided it would be fun to have their fortunes told. Bird had a brainstorm: she put on my mother’s wedding ring. You know, to test the fortune-teller.”
He paused for breath, then continued. “So they go in and pay their buck and a half to this old woman, who was wearing what my mother described as a tacky gypsy outfit—as opposed to a classy gypsy outfit, I guess—and the old woman looks in her crystal ball for a few minutes, then she looks at Bird and she says, ‘Why are you wearing that ring? You’re not married, and you’re going to have a lot of trouble before you’re ever married.’ Now, Bird’s kind of impressed with the ring thing, except that she’s engaged and getting married in a month. She decides the old woman must have seen her take Mother’s ring. Meanwhile, the old woman turns to my mother. She looks at her, she looks into her crystal ball, she looks back at my mother. Then she gets this look on her face like she’s just seen a ghost, and she says to my mother, ‘You’ll have to leave.’ My mother says, ‘What are you talking about?’ The old woman says, ‘When I see this, I don’t go near it. That’s my one rule.’ My mother says, ‘When you see what?’ But the old woman just keeps telling her to leave. Well, Mother’s not about to leave now. Finally the old woman says, ‘You’ve taken on a debt you don’t know about. You’ll pay, your children will pay, a lot of people will pay, for a long time.’ That’s all she would say, and she wouldn’t explain what it meant. She just kept saying, ‘I don’t go near this,’ and practically shoved my mother and Bird out of her tent.
“So my mother and Bird decided the old woman was a nutcase. Then, a couple of weeks later, Bird’s fiancé got drunk and wrapped his car around a tree. Died instantly. Whereupon my mother decided the fortune-teller was the real McCoy, and there was a curse on our family. Everything that went wrong after that, she blamed on the curse. When we were kids, we believed it. Then we got older and started using it. Told her we had this strange compulsion to get into trouble. We tried hard to resist, but it was just bigger than we were.”
“Did she buy it?”
“Of course. It was a hell of a lot easier than believing she was raising a bunch of sociopaths.”
“Where did she think this curse came from?”
“That was the big question. She spent the rest of her life trying to figure it out. She imported mediums from five counties and held séances in our house regularly. They consulted Ouija boards, they threw tarot cards, you name it.”
“And?”
“Pick a theory. My personal favorite was that my father’s father was a direct descendent of Genghis Khan and his spirit was haunting us. Mediums loved the fact that my father was a bastard, and not just metaphorically, because it left them wide open for the evil-ancestors stories.”
“What did your mother believe?”
“Whatever was the last story she’d been told. Although I think she liked the Genghis Khan one, too.”
“And that’s the thing?”
He nodded. “We used to call it Mother’s thing, or the curse thing. Then, eventually, just . . . the thing.”
“Then that’s it. Ryland and Tallen are trying to tell you that there really is a curse.”
Jack shook his head. “My family was cursed, all right. It started when my mother married Will Landry, and there was nothing supernatural about it.”
“Then how do you explain me seeing Ryland?”
“He’s still alive, he’s turned on me for some reason, and the family is after Cam’s money. They think if they scare the hell out of me, I’ll stay away.”
“What about the phone call?”
“I imagined it. Or I dreamed it. Who knows? I’m being taken over by the family insanity.”
“So you’d rather believe you’re losing your mind than entertain the notion of an afterlife?”
“An ‘afterlife’ is not a pleasant concept to me. This one will have been enough, thank you.”
“But a good one, to make up for this one.”
He shook his head. “It just seems so stupid to me. The idea that if you survive this quagmire—not that you’re going to survive it, because there’s only one way out of here—but if you endure it, and stay reasonably good-humored about it, surprise, there’s all sorts of meaning and order in store for you after you die. What kind of sense does that make?”
“Maybe it’s too big to understand,” Randa offered.
“Maybe it’s nonsense.”
Suddenly he stood up. He offered Randa his hand and pulled her to her feet.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you the house.”
Randa hadn’t expected that, and wasn’t sure that Jack had, either. He seemed to be trying to get out of the conversation more than anything. She followed him without speaking; she didn’t want to say anything that would make him change his mind.
He unlocked the back door, pushed it open, and stood back.
“After you.”
Randa brushed past him, crossed the threshold, and stood in their house. The back door opened into the kitchen—an old farm kitchen with beadboard walls covered in yellow-white paint that was flaking in random and somehow sinister patterns. The appliances were all several decades old, and the floor was a hideous gray-and-maroon marbled linoleum, rippled by time and curled in the corners. Jack turned on a light, which she knew only from the sound of the switch; the room didn’t get any brighter. There was nothing ghostly about the place. The eerie feeling had nothing to do with the threat of diaphanous apparitions or a sudden drop in room temperature. It was something much more insidious. Something blacker.
Evil.
She didn’t know what that meant, or if she even believed in such a thing. Still, the word came to her like someone was whispering clearly in her ear.
She looked around the room, taking it all in. Jack seemed to understand (or at least be willing to indulge) her need to do that. He stood in silent patience. He followed her when she moved on.
The living room was even drearier than the kitchen. The same beadboard in a worse state of peeling. The sofa and chairs were covered with dusty sheets. Randa couldn’t imagine why Jack would feel the need to protect the furniture, or that there was anything under the sheets worth protecting. The end tables were probably halfway decent antiques, under about twenty coats of black varnish. There were a couple of fringed Victorian lamps and even framed photos on the tables, mostly various school pictures of the boys. (Randa spotted a gap-toothed six-year-old Cam grinning up at her.) Overall, the room looked as if the family had just gone out of town for an unknown period and simply never come back.
There was a hallway on the other side of the room. Randa glanced down it and could see an open door and a little bit of a bedroom that seemed to have similarly depressing decor.
“My parents’ room,” Jack said, answering her unspoken question. “Our rooms are upstairs.”
“It’s very . . . dark.”
Jack nodded. “It always was, no matter how many lamps you turned on. The rented places were nicer, but my father liked it that way.”
“Why?”
“He wasn’t exactly a cheery guy. Cam may have mentioned that. I think he was attracted to the house’s history, too.”
“The man who murdered his family?”
Jack nodded. “His name was Bennett Reece. I think he was Will’s hero.”
“Because he murdered his family?”
Jack nodded. “I think Will admired him for having the guts to do the full job. Anyway . . . have a look around. I’ll wait outside.” He went out the back door, leaving it open behind him.
Randa was not at all happy about being in the house alone, but she didn’t blame him for wanting to be away from all the reminders, and she wasn’t about to relinquish this opportunity.
She stood in the doorway of the master bedroom and stared at a double bed with a wrought-iron headboard. She wondered how any woman could lie down and go to sleep beside a man who routinely sent her children to the emergency room. What sickness had bound the two of them? She knew it was too late for questions like that to be answered. It was too late for them to even matter.
When she returned to the living room, Jack was still outside. She could see him in the front yard, walking aimlessly, gazing out at the land. He didn’t look her way as she headed for the stairs.
The old wood creaked in protest under her weight. The stairs were sunken in the middle from too many years of use, and the entire stairway, wall included, listed toward the left side of the house. About halfway up the stairs, the beadboard ended, and Randa was amazed to find that the remaining walls were unfinished. The planks were gray-brown and weathered like the side of a barn, and there were cracks between them on the inside walls. At the top of the stairs were three tiny rooms; all still had small beds and dressers. Twin beds and a small dresser filled the middle room, leaving no space for anything else. Randa assumed this was the room that Jack and Tallen had shared.
She felt a lump rise in her throat as she thought of Cam and Jack, and even the ones she didn’t know, living up here in what was barely more than an attic. She thought of them lying in bed, listening to their parents try to kill each other in the rooms below. Cam had told her he was the only one of the four who’d ever ventured downstairs to try to break up the fights. The rest of them had either put their heads under their pillows or climbed out windows and gone off into the night, looking for trouble they could control.
She made her way back down the stairs slowly. She stopped when she saw Jack. He was standing just inside the door, staring at an empty spot in the far corner of the room. He didn’t show any sign of noticing her.
“Jack?”
He broke out of his trance and saw her looking at him. “Sorry. I just . . . flashed on something.”
“What?” she asked, as she eased down the last two steps.
“The day they killed Tallen,” he said in a quiet voice. He breathed deeply, collecting himself before he continued. “He didn’t want any of us there, so my mother and Cam and I were sitting here the next morning . . .” He nodded toward the corner. “There used to be a TV over there, and we were watching the news. This sports—”
He stopped; laughed to himself, a bitter laugh. “I almost said sportscaster.” He shook his head; took another moment.
“This reporter was interviewing people on the street about the execution . . . and there was this woman . . . she had on this hat. I don’t know why it matters, but something about that hat just irked the hell out of me. Anyway, the reporter asked her if the execution made her feel like justice had been served, and she said that it did, then she said, ‘Some people are just animals, and you kill rabid animals, so what’s the difference?’ ”
He stopped again and took yet another breath, upset by the memory.
“My mother had this antique iron she used as a doorstop. I grabbed it and . . . kind of . . . hurled it through the TV screen.” He smiled sadly.
“That couldn’t have been good for the TV,” Randa said, trying to lighten the mood.
“No, but it sure felt great.” He chuckled, looking at the corner again. “Glass flew everywhere. Smoke, sparks, the works. My mother screamed.”
“What did Cam do?”
Jack’s face clouded over. “Saint Cam was not pleased. He just picked up his suitcase and walked out the door. Went back to LA. I didn’t see him again until my mother’s funeral a year later.” Jack looked out the window, as if he were watching Cam go.
“That seems like a cruel thing to do to your mother. Just walking out, on that day?”
He paused for a second, letting the anger pass.
“My mother,” he continued, “was so far gone by that point. Tallen’s death was really the last straw.” He took a few steps away from Randa, as if he needed the distance. She could see his face go taut with pain. “Have you ever read a detailed account of what happens when someone is electrocuted?” he asked.
“No,” Randa answered, without admitting that she’d tried to once and hadn’t been able to get through it.
“I read every one I could get my hands on. I hunted for them. It was like a compulsion. I just had to know.”
Randa prayed he wasn’t going to share any of it with her, but she knew what was coming.
“They shave the person’s head, you know, so they can attach the electrodes. And then they have to rub this gel in—something that helps conduct the electricity. The gel has to be rubbed in really well; takes about forty-five minutes. Imagine sitting there for forty-five minutes while someone rubs gel into your head so they can kill you easier. But that’s really nothing compared to the rest of it.”
Randa wanted desperately not to hear the rest of it, but she sensed he needed to tell her. She braced herself.
“The body reaches a temperature of about nineteen hundred degrees—there have been cases where a body was so hot it melted the electrodes. The skin turns bright red and stretches, almost to the point of breaking. The brain reaches the boiling point of water. The eyes pop out of the sockets and end up resting on the cheeks. Witnesses say there’s this loud sound, like bacon frying, and it smells—I don’t know, like however it smells when you cook a person. Smoke comes out of the person’s head, sometimes flames. And this is all if everything goes well. I read about this one where something went wrong and it took twenty minutes and three separate jolts of electricity to kill the guy. He stayed conscious for a while, and in between jolts, he was begging them to hurry. By the time he was finally pronounced dead, the body was so hot they had to wait an hour before they could even touch him to move him out of the room.” He stopped for a moment, but he wasn’t done. “In one of the articles I read, a doctor described it as ‘setting a person on fire from the inside.’ ”
Randa nodded. She wanted to tell him he was preaching to the choir, but there’d be time for that later.
“Can you imagine having all that happen to someone you love? Your brother? Your child?”
“No,” Randa said quietly. There was no way she could imagine it.
“Well, if it does, there’s no way you can avoid imagining it.” He took a breath, then: “So . . . if you want to know how my mother was . . . that’s how she was. The warden might as well have strapped her in next to Tallen. When she finally killed herself, it was just a formality.”
Randa didn’t know what to say, yet the silence was too sensitive to bear. Jack stared at the floor, unable to meet her eyes. She had a strong urge to go over and put her arms around him, but she couldn’t imagine him letting her (or anyone) do that.
“I’m really, really sorry.” It sounded ridiculously lame, but she didn’t know what else to say. “For what you went through.”
He looked at her, frowning. “For what I went through?”
“All of you. The whole thing.”
He just stared at her, not knowing what to make of it.
“Why don’t we go,” she suggested. She was uncomfortable under his stare, and he needed to get out of the place, whether he knew it or not. He nodded, looking enormously relieved. He turned and headed back through the kitchen. Randa followed. She reached up and put her hand on his back. She felt him flinch under her touch; she pulled her hand away.
Outside, he locked the door behind them. Then, after staring at her face for a brief moment, he reached for her hand. Randa wouldn’t have been any more surprised if he’d slapped her, and she doubted she was doing a good job of hiding that fact. He led her back toward the car, gripping her hand tightly, as if they’d come to some kind of an understanding. When they reached the car, he stopped. He looked at her as if he had something important to say, but didn’t speak. Then she noticed that he was leaning closer. Was he . . . was he going to kiss her? She hadn’t had time to wonder how she felt about it when he quickly pulled away, and his head jerked in the opposite direction.
“What was that?” he asked.
“What?”
He cocked his head and squinted, as if reacting to a sound. “That!” He looked at her. “You didn’t hear that?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t hear anything.”
He took a few steps toward the house, listening. After a moment, he turned and hurried back to her. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, and got into the car. Randa, left with no option, followed.
“What is going on?” she asked, slamming her door.
“Nothing. It must have been the wind.” He was gone again, back inside his shell. And there was no wind, but Randa knew it would do no good to point that out.
Neither of them spoke on the ride back into town. Randa didn’t know what to say, and Jack just stared out the window. He asked if she would drop him off at his place, and she pulled up in front of the boardinghouse and turned the engine off.
“Look, why don’t we go out to dinner tonight?” she said, pressing her luck. “We can relax, talk some more.” She stopped. A look had come over his face, as if she’d just told him the tumor was inoperable.
“Dinner? You mean, at Tillie’s?”
“No. Someplace nice. Someplace with dim lighting and a liquor license.”
He looked out the window. “I don’t know.”
A thought occurred to her. “Is it that you don’t have anything to wear?”
He looked at her. “Did you go through my closet, too?”
“That’s not an answer,” she said, avoiding the accusation.
“Neither is that,” he said with a slight smile. “No, it isn’t because I don’t have anything to wear. You can’t belong to my family without owning a suit; there’s a funeral every other week.”
“Then what is it?”
“You know. I don’t do things like that.”
“Yeah, it seems to work, too. You’re obviously happy.”
He looked out the window and didn’t answer.
Randa tried again. “One night isn’t going to kill you. It’ll be good for you. You might even have fun. Or is ‘fun’ something else you don’t do?”
“All right,” he said. “Uncle. But I’m not drinking, and you’re not getting anything out of me in dim lighting that you wouldn’t get out of me at Tillie’s.”
“We’ll see. I’ll come back at six to pick you up,” she said.
“Whatever,” he said, either resigned or feigning resignation. He held the door open but didn’t make a move to get out.
Uh-oh . . . he’s coming up with an excuse . . .
“Did you go through my closet?” he finally said.
“Don’t worry. I didn’t touch a single skeleton.”
“I don’t understand why I don’t hate you,” he said, and got out of the car.
As she soaked in the antique claw-foot tub in her bathroom at the guesthouse, Randa took stock of her life. She’d been valedictorian of her high school class. Graduated magna cum laude (fifteenth in a class of 929) from a college that prided itself on an impossible curriculum and a high suicide rate. She’d moved to Los Angeles to set the world on fire, win a Pulitzer, and marry some fascinating man who adored her—preferably another writer. They’d buy a Greene & Greene bungalow in Pasadena, just off the parade route, and every year they’d throw a New Year’s Eve party that people would live in terror of not being invited to. She and Mr. Perfect would both have offices at home, on opposite sides of the house, and they’d write all day. At night they would sit in front of a fire and drink brandy and read poetry aloud, or talk about their work. (Mr. Perfect, of course, would be far too secure to be jealous of her accomplishments.) Eventually, they’d have a couple of gorgeous kids and a politically correct dog, and in between carpooling and trips to the vet, she’d write the Great American Novel.
Now here she was, all these years later, without one thing that even resembled the life she’d dreamed of. Instead, she lived alone in a tiny, overpriced apartment with no air-conditioning and lousy plumbing; she was welded to a low-paying, dead-end job, the politics of which were taking years off her life. Mr. Perfect, who wasn’t all that perfect to begin with, had ridden off into the sunset with her best friend and then, just for spite, had invited Randa to his suicide. Now, for reasons unknown to her, she was spending her trust fund on a lovely vacation in Mayberry R.F.D., where she was sitting in a strange tub, in a strange room, in a strange town, thrilled to death because Mr. Perfect’s estranged brother—an antisocial day laborer with a prison record—had grudgingly accepted a dinner invitation that she didn’t know why she had extended.
“I’m insane,” she said to a glass of bad merlot.
At least that was something she and Jack would have in common.