It was the most hideous house I’d ever seen in my life. It looked like a giant wooden wedding cake made of balconies, porches, and turrets. Everywhere you looked was another little roof and another tiny, useless porch. Skinny, carved posts ran across every edge and surrounded every window. Windows seemed to have the sole purpose of adding more ornamentation to the whole ghastly edifice. The late afternoon sunlight glinted off the edges of beveled glass, highlighting stained-glass windows which depicted various animals and birds.
Even in good repair, the house would have been a monstrosity, but this one was falling apart. Three gutters hung by pieces of twisted wire. A couple of panes of glass were covered by Masonite. I saw cracked balustrades, broken window frames, and porch floorboards that were split and probably rotten.
Then there was the paint—or the lack of it. Whatever color the house was originally had been lost to a hundred-plus years of sun and rain. Everything had faded to dull gray-blue, and the paint was peeling everywhere.
I turned the car into the weed-infested driveway and stared in disbelief. The lawns around the house had been cut, but the old flower beds were knee-high in weeds. There was a broken birdbath and an old arbor that had vines growing through the paved floor. Back against the trees I could see two benches that sat at angles because half their legs were missing.
I really don’t care about any story enough to stay in this house, I thought. I turned to Jackie to offer an apology and tell her we’d find a hotel somewhere, but she was already getting out of the car, an unreadable expression on her face. Probably shock, I thought. Or horror. I knew how she felt. One look at this place and I wanted to run away, too.
But Jackie wasn’t running away. Instead, she was already up the porch stairs and at the front door. I practically leaped out of the car to run after her. I had to warn her that the place didn’t look safe.
She was standing on the porch and looking around, her eyes wide. There had to be fifty pieces of old furniture on that porch. There were beat-up wicker chairs with dirty, faded cushions, and half a dozen dinky little wire tables that weren’t big enough to hold more than a teacup—or a glass of sarsaparilla, I thought.
Jackie seemed to be as speechless as I was. She put her hand on top of an old oak cabinet. “It’s an icebox,” she said and the odd tone of her voice made me look at her more closely.
“What do you think of this place?” I asked.
“It’s the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen,” she said softly, and there was so much raw passion in her voice that I groaned.
I’d had some experience with women and houses and knew that a woman could love a house the way a man loved a car. Personally, I couldn’t see it. Houses took too much work.
I followed Jackie inside. I’d asked the realtor how I could get the key to my “new” house and she’d just laughed. Now I saw why. No respectable burglar was going to waste his time on this place.
When Jackie opened the unlocked front door, I saw that it was even worse inside. The door opened to a large hallway, with a winding staircase directly in front of us. The staircase might have been impressive if both sides of each step weren’t covered with foot-high stacks of old magazines. The trail up the stairs was no more than eighteen inches wide.
In the entrance hall was an oak hall tree: big, ugly, with six moth-eaten hats hanging from hooks. On both sides of the hall were three-foot-tall stacks of yellowing and brittle newspapers. On the floor was a rug so threadbare there was no pile left.
“There’s an Oriental rug under that, and it’s made out of tile,” Jackie said as she disappeared between double doors of a room on the left.
Kneeling, I lifted up the corner of the dusty rug and saw that beneath it was, indeed, an Oriental “rug” made of mosaic tiles. It was the work of a master craftsman and if it weren’t so dirty, it would have been beautiful.
I followed Jackie into the next room. “How did you know about…” I began, but couldn’t finish the sentence. She was standing in the middle of the parlor, better known as the living room. I’d been told that the house had been continuously occupied for over a hundred years, and when I looked about that room, I was willing to bet that every occupant had bought at least six pieces of furniture—and each one was still there. To walk between the furniture, even skinny Jackie had to turn sideways. In a far corner were three frighteningly ugly walnut-trimmed Victorian chairs covered in worn-out red velvet. Next to them was a 1960s flourescent green sofa that had pillows on it printed with big lips. In the opposite corner was a square couch that looked Art Deco. Along the walls were old oak bookcases, new white bookcases, and a cheap pine cabinet with doors hanging by one hinge. Every souvenir anyone had bought over the course of a hundred years was in that room. Above the bookcases were framed prints, dirty oil paintings, and what looked to be a hundred or more old photographs in frames of varying degrees of dilapidation.
“They’ve moved all the furniture into here. Wonder why?” Jackie said as she left the parlor and went into the room across the hall.
I started to follow her but I tripped over a stuffed duck. Not like a kid’s stuffed toy duck, but a real bird, something that had once flown through the air and was now sitting on my living room floor, feathers and all.
As I untangled myself from the duck, three more fell off a shelf and pelted me. It was a mother duck and her ducklings, preserved forever in lifelessness. After I’d conquered my urge to scream, I ran out the door and into the room across the hall.
Jackie was standing in what I assumed was the library. Three walls were covered with grand old bookcases and the ceiling was magnificently coffered. The bookcases were filled with old leather-bound volumes that made me itch with wanting to look at them. But it would take a forklift to make a path to those books because in front of them were cardboard shelves—the kind with wood-grained wallpaper on them (as though that would fool anyone)—filled with thirty years of best-sellers. Everything Harold Robbins and Louis L’Amour had written was in those shelves.
“It’s the same,” Jackie said, her eyes still glazed over, as though she were in a trance.
As she turned to leave the room, I made a lunge to grab her arm, but I missed because my foot caught on an old coal bucket that was filled with paperbacks. Four copies of Frank Yerby fell on my foot. I stepped out of the books and started forward, but when I saw a copy of Fanny Hill, I picked it up, put it in my back pocket, and went after Jackie.
I found her in the room behind the library, the dining room. Tall windows ate up one wall and would have let in light if two-thirds of them hadn’t been swathed in dark purple velvet draperies. I started to speak but was distracted by what I was sure was a bird’s nest at the top of the curtains.
“It’s fake,” Jackie said, seeing where I was looking. “It has tiny porcelain eggs in it.” With that she left the room.
I started to run after her but three of the eighteen or so mismatched chairs in the room stuck out their legs and tried to trip me.
It was too much! I knocked the chairs over—after all, they were mine now—and ran into the hallway. No Jackie. I stood there for a moment, then I let out a bellow that sounded as though it were coming from the moose head I’d seen somewhere.
Jackie appeared instantly. “What in the world is wrong with you?” she asked.
Where do I begin? I wondered, then got hold of myself. “How do you know so much about this place?”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “My father said we lived in Cole Creek for only a few months when I was very young, but for all I know we lived in this house. Maybe my parents were housekeeper and handyman, that sort of thing.”
“If you remember so much, you must have been older than ‘very young.’”
“I think you may be right,” she said as she entered the big room across from the dining room. I followed her, but stopped short. It was a smaller room than the others and it was clean and neat. Even the windows had been washed. The ceiling was exquisitely painted with vines and flowers, and the floor was blond oak inlaid with a border of walnut. What was really good was that there wasn’t one piece of furniture in the room.
Jackie stood in the doorway looking around, but I walked in to sit down on a cushionless window seat.
“I think Mr. Belcher moved everything out of here and into the other rooms,” she said as she walked to a corner of the room and picked up a small brown prescription bottle. “I think this was his sick room, and he probably lived in here.”
“Hey!” I said. “Is that an outlet for cable TV?”
Looking at me, she shook her head in disgust. “You’re not much of an intellectual, are you?” she said over her shoulder as she left the room.
The thing I liked most about Jackie Maxwell was that she treated me as a man, not a best-seller, but a man. The thing I liked least about Jackie Maxwell was that she treated me like an ordinary human being and not with the deference that my success deserved.
I found her in the kitchen. It was a big room with white metal cabinets over worn and dented stainless steel countertops. The height of 1930s elegance. Truthfully, I was surprised to see that the house had been touched since it had been built in 1896. In the middle of the room was an oak table that had thousands upon thousands of knife cuts in it.
Jackie looked inside the cabinets while I opened the doors to the left. First was a big walk-in pantry, every inch of shelf space crammed full of boxes and cans of food. Reaching to the back of the highest shelf, I pulled down a box of cereal with a photo of a man in a football uniform from about 1915. I was tempted to look inside the box, but thought better of it and put it back.
Two other doors revealed a powder room with a pull chain toilet and a maid’s room with a narrow, hard-looking brass bed.
When I walked back into the kitchen I was hit by a smell so awful I put my hand over my nose. Jackie had opened the round-cornered refrigerator.
She sneezed a couple of times and I coughed. “I got the contents of the ’frig in the deal?” I asked.
“Seems so. You ready to go look at the upstairs?”
“Only if I have to,” I muttered as I followed her out of the kitchen back to the front staircase. I’d been looking at the endless spiral of old magazines and hadn’t noticed the little brass dragon on the top of the newel post.
“Wonder if it still works?” Jackie said under her breath, then gave a sharp twist to the pointed tip of the dragon’s tail.
I jumped back as a four-inch-long blue flame shot out of the dragon’s mouth.
She twisted the tail tip again and the flame stopped.
“Cool,” I said. It was the first thing I’d seen in the house that I really liked.
Jackie ran up the stairs, having no trouble stepping between the piles, while I stayed downstairs to investigate the dragon. It was amazing that the thing was still hooked up to a gas line after all these years, and even more amazing that it still worked. The tail tip could use a little oil, I thought as I turned it again.
“Can I have the mistress’s bedroom?” Jackie called from above.
I was looking down the dragon’s mouth, trying to see the gas pipe inside. “Yeah,” I said, “but who gets the wife’s bedroom?”
“Very funny,” she said. “Could you stop playing with that and look up at where I am?”
She was at the very top of the stair spiral, third floor. A huge, round, stained-glass window was in the ceiling above her head.
“Stairs like these were air-conditioning,” she said. “Hot air rises.”
“Straight up to the servants’ bedrooms?” I was kneeling to see where the gas line entered the newel post.
“The heat up here would keep them downstairs so they could work,” Jackie called down, then her voice lowered. “My goodness, the old nursery has been converted to an office. I bet they stored that big old train set in the attic.”
Train set? I quit looking at the dragon and decided to mosey on upstairs.
Jackie met me on the landing of the second floor, and dutifully, I looked at four bedrooms, three bathrooms straight out of a BBC set of Edwardian England, and a storage room so full of boxes we couldn’t open the door all the way.
At the front of the house was a master and “mistress” suite. Two big bedrooms, each with a private bath, had a sitting room between them that opened onto the spiral staircase. The bedroom Jackie wanted so much that I could see her heart beating in her throat, had doors opening onto a deep, round porch that was filled with delicate white furniture. It was no hardship on my part to say she could have the room.
As with the downstairs, the second floor rooms were full of furniture and semi-antique junk. The wallpaper was enough to give a person nightmares. The flowers on it could swallow a person whole. Jackie’s bedroom had roses on the wallpaper—complete with needle-pointed serrated leaves and stems with thorns a quarter inch long. It was creepy.
The only room I truly liked was my bathroom. It had wallpaper of dark green leaves interspersed now and then with small oranges. (“William Morris,” Jackie said.) All the original mahogany bathroom fixtures were in the room and they all worked. There was no shower but there was a bathtub—
“William Taft could get in that tub,” Jackie said.
“With the first lady,” I said, looking at her to see if she was going to accuse me of making a sex joke. When she laughed, I was glad. None of my other assistants had laughed at my jokes.
I was getting hungry so I suggested we find a grocery before it got too late. Jackie gave a longing look upward and I knew she wanted to rummage around in the rooms on the top floor. Part of me said I should tell her to stay in the house and I’d go to the grocery alone, but I didn’t want to do that.
The truth was, the long drive down together had been pleasant. I was glad to see that she wasn’t one of those women who talks nonstop. And she seemed to already know something about me because at the first gas station she had instinctively chosen my favorite snacks.
I felt only relief after we got outside the house again. It would be dark in another hour, so I thought we should go. But Jackie got within three feet of the car door, then floated off toward the broken birdbath. I went to her, put my hands on both her elbows, ushered her into the car, and backed out of the driveway. Since we’d entered the little town from the east, I drove west, this time staying on a numbered highway.
Once we were out of the town, Jackie seemed to come to herself. “I know you bought a furnished house, but—”
“Yes?” I asked.
“The truth is, there are some things missing.”
“Besides parts of the roof, the railings, and the windows?”
Jackie waved her hand in dismissal. “You didn’t happen to see the pots and pans in the kitchen, did you? Or lift up the quilts on the beds? Or touch the pillows?”
The answer was no to all her questions so she filled me in. It seemed that in terms of livability, the house might as well have been vacant. There were probably sixty-one Statue of Liberty souvenirs in the living room, but no bed linens, and I could just imagine the pillows: hard, damp, and moldy.
About twenty miles out of town, around twisty mountain roads, was a Wal-Mart. I didn’t say a word to Jackie, just turned into the parking lot. I must say that she was an efficient little thing. She grabbed a cart, I got another one, and thirty minutes later they were packed so full she couldn’t see over the top of hers. I had to grab the front of her cart and lead it to the register.
“It’s a good thing you’re rich,” she said, looking at our hoard of kitchen paraphernalia—clean, new kitchen equipment—plus sheets, towels, and paper products.
The first few times she’d made these offhand remarks I’d wanted to tell her where to get off, but now I was beginning to get used to them. This time I smiled. “Yeah. It is good I’m rich. With a house like that one, I might as well paper the walls with twenties. How in the world will I be able to sell it?”
“Sell?” Jackie asked, her face falling, and looking like a kid who’d just been told her pet rabbit was going to be eaten. “How could you sell a house like that?”
“I doubt if I’ll be able to. I’ll probably die owning the place.”
She started to say something, but it was our turn at the register so she started unloading.
After Wal-Mart, we went to a grocery store and again filled two carts. At the checkout counter I was selecting candy bars when she said, “Are you planning to eat those things before or after dinner?” The way she said it made me put half the candy back.
When we got back Jackie said that she’d cook dinner “this once” if I’d bring in the groceries. I agreed quickly. Cooking was not something I was good at. By the time the groceries were in and put away (one shelf of the pantry cleaned off, refrigerated food in the iced-down cooler we’d bought) she’d set the table with candles and plates that even to my untrained eye looked expensive.
She saw me looking at them. “Limoges,” she said. “The cabinet in the dining room has three sets for twelve.”
“Wonder why Belcher didn’t take them with him?”
“And do what with them?” Jackie asked, stirring something on the old gas stove. There was a single bare bulb over the cooking surface and it was so low wattage it made a little spotlight around Jackie, highlighting her and the cooktop in the dark room. “You told me the realtor said he’s over ninety, heirless, and an invalid. He probably eats off those suction plates made for babies. And if he sells the dishes, who does he leave the money to? However…”
I ate a cracker she’d spread with cheese and put half an olive on top of, and waited for her to finish.
“He did take the silver.”
We laughed together. So much for old age and no heirs. I ate four more of the cracker things. “You almost seem to know the man personally.”
“True,” she said, spatula paused in midair. “I feel like I almost know what he looks like. And I seem to know a lot about this house. I’m beginning to think my father told me a few little white lies.” She paused a moment. “And maybe one or two whoppers.”
I thought about what she was saying. Her father had said they’d lived in Cole Creek for only a short time when Jackie was “very young,” but she seemed to remember too much for that to be true. And what “whoppers” was she referring to? Yeow! Her mother? “You think your mother could be alive?” I asked, trying to sound causal.
She took a moment before answering, but I could tell that she was working hard to get her emotions under control. “I don’t know. I do remember that they fought a lot. I think maybe he kidnapped me, and that maybe the reason we spent our lives moving from one town to another was so she and the law wouldn’t find us. He didn’t have a copy of my birth certificate and whenever I asked for facts, he became vague.”
“Interesting,” I said, trying to sound lighthearted. I had an idea she’d just told me more than she’d ever told anyone else. “Maybe my next book will be about a young woman who finds her origins.”
“That’s my book,” she said quickly. “You’re here to find the devil so you can talk to him about your wife.”
Damn! but she could cut! I had a cracker at my lips when she said that, and it was as though my heart stopped beating. Not even in my own mind had I let myself think of the truth of what she’d just said.
She was standing absolutely still at the stove, her back to me, spatula paused. I couldn’t see her face, but the back of her neck had become three shades darker than normal.
I knew that what I replied would set the tone for our future relationship. About two-thirds of me wanted to tell her she was fired and to get the hell out of my life. But I looked at that candlelit table and the last thing I wanted was yet another evening alone.
“Only God would know anything about Pat,” I said at last. “The devil would say, ‘Never heard of her.’”
Slowly, she turned to look at me, and there was such gratitude on her face that I had to look away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Sometimes I say things that—”
“Are the truth as you see it?” I asked, not wanting to hear her apology. Truthfully, I think that my first idea about the project had been about Pat. Maybe I’d thought that if I could find out how one became a ghost, I could figure out how to bring Pat back in spirit form. Or maybe a witch could cast a spell to bring her back.
But as I started reading, the project itself had begun to interest me. For one thing, several states claimed the same stories. Did that make them folklore rather than truth?
We were quiet for a while as Jackie served some kind of chicken casserole that was quite good. She seemed to be a vegetable fanatic because she put three kinds of vegetables on the table, plus potatoes, plus more vegetables in the casserole.
At first we ate in silence, then I started telling her how close she’d been in her assessment of why I’d started on the ghosts and witches, but that I’d changed.
“Maybe I’m being romantic, but I’d like to find out if there’s any truth in those old stories. Or maybe I’d just like to give the readers a bloody good read.”
“Better to want a good story than to ask the devil for anything,” she said as she began to clear the table.
Since there was no dishwasher, I washed and she dried. After the kitchen was cleaned up (except for the mold growing over most surfaces) we went upstairs and started on the bedrooms. She laughed when I complained about the hideous wallpaper in my bedroom. It was dark green, magenta, and black. The bed was dark walnut, as were the other thirty or so pieces of furniture in the room. Between the wallpaper and the furniture, the room was as light as a tunnel at midnight.
“How about if tomorrow I call an auction house and get rid of the excess furniture?” she asked. “Actually, you could get rid of all of it, then buy new.”
When I looked at that ugly old bed, the thought of buying something new made me smile. White maybe.
But then I caught myself. I was not going to be living in this tiny throwback of a town. I was going to do some research here then move on to—Well, I had no idea where I was going, but it would be far away from this horror-movie house.
Jackie and I put new, but unwashed sheets (an ancient washer and dryer were in the pantry, harvest gold, sixties vintage) on my bed, then we went to her room to do the same.
“You know,” she said slowly, “I saw a Lowe’s just down the hill from the grocery.” She stopped tucking in her side of the sheet and looked at me as though I was supposed to read her mind. When I said nothing, she told me that if you buy new appliances at Lowe’s, they take your old ones away. When I realized what she was saying, we looked at each other and laughed. Some poor, unsuspecting appliance movers would take away that refrigerator whose smell could pollute outer space.
“What time do they open?” I asked, and we laughed some more.
An hour later, as I snuggled down in bed (and vowed to get a new mattress) I felt better than I had in a long time, and I finally allowed myself to think about the devil story that Jackie had told me in the car. I don’t think she had any idea how unusual her story was. For the last couple of years I’d been reading regional ghost stories, and for the most part, they were quite mild—so mild that I couldn’t remember any of them an hour after I’d finished the book. There was so little meat in the stories that the writers had had to embellish them with long phrases about the beauty of the people, or add some sinister aspect that had nothing to do with the real story. You could feel that the writer was just trying to fill up pages.
But Jackie’s story was different. The first version, the so-called “factual” story, the one she said her mother had told her, was interesting, but it sounded like several small town legends I’d read.
I didn’t want Jackie to know it, but it was her second story that interested me. I’d already seen that she was a good storyteller, but her dramatic telling of the devil story had given me the creeps.
Jackie started by describing the woman who’d been murdered. She told of a woman who was kind to everyone, who loved children, and who always wore a smile.
Jackie said that the woman used to take long walks in the woods, and, one day, she came to a beautiful house made of stone and a man was there. Jackie described him as “nice looking, like Santa Claus, without the beard.” I wanted to ask her how she knew this, but there was something so odd about the way she was telling the story that I didn’t interrupt her.
She said the woman had gone often to the house, and Jackie told about food the nice man and nice woman had shared, how they’d laughed and talked together. She told about the pretty flowers that grew all around the house and how the inside smelled like gingerbread.
After a few moments, I realized what was odd about her storytelling. There were two things. One was that Jackie related it as though she’d been an eyewitness, and the second was that she told it in the manner of a very young child. When she came to the part where the townspeople saw the couple, she said, “You could see all the people through the bushes…” “How many people?” I wanted to ask, but didn’t, and as she spoke, it occurred to me that the child who saw this may have been too young to know how to count. If I’d asked Jackie how many people were there, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d said, “Eleventy-seven.”
She said some “grown-ups” had seen the woman but they couldn’t see the man because he was invisible. Jackie said the townspeople had shouted at the woman but Jackie didn’t seem to know what they’d said, just that they were “shouting.” When the woman had backed up, she’d fallen, and her ankle had been caught between some rocks. “She couldn’t get out,” Jackie said in what seemed to me to be a child’s voice. “So they piled more rocks on top of her.”
When Jackie told the rest of the story, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. It seemed that after the townspeople left, the woman hadn’t died right away. Jackie said she’d “cried for a long time.” What really got to me was when Jackie told of “someone trying to get her out” but “she” couldn’t lift the stones.
I didn’t say anything then and I tried not to think about it, but I couldn’t help speculating. From the first I’d been told that this pressing happened many years ago. But after hearing what Jackie said was a “made-up version” of the story, I couldn’t help but wonder if it had happened in recent times. And was it possible that Jackie had seen this horrible thing? Had Jackie been a child and seen some adults put stones on a woman, then leave her to die a slow, agonizing death? Had Jackie the child crawled out of her hiding place and tried to get the rocks off the woman but failed?
Jackie told me that her father had taken her away from her mother on the night he’d found out that his wife had told the devil story. Looking at it from an adult point of view, I wondered if her father knew his young daughter had witnessed the murder, and when his wife told their daughter about the murder and said it was “right,” the man had been driven over the edge.
When Jackie finished her story, I’d been quiet, thinking about it all. I wanted to ask questions, but at the same time, I didn’t want to ask them. It was my guess that Jackie had been much more involved than she knew—or wanted to know.
As I settled myself more snugly under the sheets, I wondered if I really wanted to write about this story. If my theory was correct, maybe I should find something else to write about. Something that wasn’t recent and didn’t involve living people.
As I fell asleep, I knew I was being torn in half. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, but at the same time, for the first time in years, I was excited by a story. A true story. What I was good at.
The next morning, I was awakened by sounds over my head. When I opened my eyes and saw that wallpaper, I jumped, but then I remembered where I was, and sighed. House of Horrors. I lay there for a while, listening. My watch, on the heavy marble-topped table beside the bed, said it wasn’t even six yet and I could see that it was barely daylight out. It could be robbers making the noise upstairs, I thought, hope buoying my spirits. Maybe they were looking for hidden jewels in the attic. Maybe in their search they’d take away some of the trash in this house.
I heard a loud sneeze. No such luck. Little Miss High Energy was already upstairs moving boxes around.
Reluctantly getting out of bed, I shivered. The mountains of western North Carolina were quite cool in the morning. I took my time taking a bath (at least the hot water tank worked well) and getting dressed before I went upstairs to see what was going on.
Opening doors, I looked around before going to the room where I heard the noise. There were a couple of bedrooms and a bath that I was sure had been servants’quarters. The bleakness of the rooms was depressing; they were lightless, airless, and colorless.
At the front of the house was a fairly large room with a big window. I can write in here, I thought as I looked out the window. I could see over the shorter houses across the road to the mountains beyond. The mountains were in the distance, blue and misty, and so beautiful they made me draw in my breath and hold it.
I stayed that way for a while, then looked at the giant oak desk that set at an angle to the window. I could sit there and write and, when I needed to think, I could turn and look out at those mountains. In the far corner of the room, where there was now some hard little sofa that looked as though it was covered in horsehair, I could put a real couch, something soft, with wide arms that could hold papers.
A loud noise from down the corridor brought me out of my reverie, so I went to see what my industrious little assistant was doing.
She was in a big room that looked like the quintessential attic from every old movie ever made. I looked around for the discarded dressmaker’s dummy. There was always a discarded dressmaker’s dummy.
“So now you show up to help,” Jackie said, sounding angry.
I started to snap back at her, but then I saw her face. She looked awful. Her eyes were sunken, with dark circles beneath them. At my age I looked like that every morning, but at her age, she was supposed to look dewy-fresh. “So what’s wrong with you?” I asked in the same tone she’d used with me. “Ghosts in your room?”
To my horror, she sat down on an old trunk, put her hands over her face, and began to cry.
My first impulse was to run away. Second was to rent an apartment in New York and stay away from females forever.
Instead, I sat down on the trunk next to her and said, “What’s wrong?”
She took a couple of minutes to get herself together. I didn’t have any tissues nor did she, and the only cloth in that room would be so full of dust it would probably have suffocated her. So she sniffed a lot.
“I’m sorry,” she said at last. “You’ll never believe this, but my dad said I never cry. Not even as a child. It was a joke between us. He used to say, ‘What kind of tragedy would it take to make you cry?’ Of course I bawled my head off at his funeral but—”
When she looked up at me, she saw that this was more than I wanted to hear. I had enough grief inside me. I didn’t need to add anyone else’s.
“I had a dream,” she said.
I looked toward the door. Had I been insane to invite this stranger to live with me? Was I now condemned to daily recitations of her dreams? Was she prone to nightmares? Was she going to wake me in the middle of the night screaming?
Then I’d have to comfort her and—I looked at her. She was more cute than pretty and she seemed to fluctuate, at random, from being nice to having a tongue like a razor blade. However, she also had a beautiful voice and a round little fanny that was quite nice. And yesterday at a pit stop she’d started doing some contortions worthy of a performer at Cirque du Soleil.
“What was your dream?” I heard myself ask, which annoyed me because I hated dreams so much that when I was reading novels that told of the hero’s, er, ah, protagonist’s, dream, I’d skip the passage.
“It was—” she began, then stopped. Getting up, she opened an old box that had ancient, dried-out tape on it.
I think she meant not to tell me, but she couldn’t stop herself. Turning, she sat down on the box and I heard something inside rustle, like old leaves crunching.
“It was just so real,” she said softly, “and I was so helpless.” When she looked up at me, her eyes were hollow-looking, and I was silent. I’d never had a dream I could remember past breakfast, much less one that upset me this much.
“You and I were in your car,” she said, “driving along a mountain road, and when we rounded a sharp curve we saw an overturned car. Four teenagers were standing by it, and they were laughing. You and I could see that they were happy because, even though they’d just been in a wreck, they were safe and unhurt. But the next second the car exploded and pieces of it flew everywhere.”
Putting her hands over her face for a moment, Jackie looked back at me. “You and I were safe in your car, but those kids were…They were cut apart by the flying pieces of steel. Arms, legs, a…a head went flying through the air.” She took a breath. “What was so horrible was that we could do nothing to save them. Absolutely nothing.”
It did seem like an odd dream. Weren’t most people’s nightmares about something that was trying to get them? But Jackie had been perfectly safe in her dream. Sure, flying body parts were horrible, but she’d been upset because we could do nothing to help those poor dismembered kids.
I don’t know why but it pleased me that she’d said “we.” It was as though she believed that I would have helped if I could. In her dream she didn’t think I was the kind of person who’d see an exploding car and think only of getting myself to safety.
I’m sure it was awful of me, but her dream kind of made me feel good.
I smiled at her. “How about if we have breakfast, then go buy some appliances? Refrigerator, washer, dryer, microwave. You want a new stove? Hey! How about some air conditioners?”
Sniffing, she looked at me with an expression that made me think I’d said something wrong. “Window air conditioners?” she asked.
I played dumb. “Sure. We’ll stick them out the windows and paint them purple to match the house.”
Her eyes widened for a second, as though she believed me, then she relaxed. “Why don’t we tear out that big colored-glass skylight over the stairs and put in an air conditioner up there?”
“Great idea,” I said enthusiastically. “Think they carry them that size locally?”
“The Victorian Historical Society carries them,” she said, smiling.
“You just tell them what you plan to do and they take care of you.” She made her hand into a gun as though some Victorian-loving zealot would shoot me.
When we laughed together, I was glad I’d been able to take her mind off her bad dream.
“Come on,” I said, “I’ll make you an omelet.”
I didn’t cook, but I set the table and cut up some fruit per Jackie’s directions, and she told me about what she’d seen in the attic. There were old clothes and boxes of broken toys, and costume jewelry from the fifties plus lots of old phonograph records.
“There are some nice things up there,” Jackie said, “and someone, somewhere, would like to have them. Even those old magazines in the hall are of interest to somebody.”
“EBay,” I said, my mouth full of an omelet filled with green and red peppers. No ham. At the grocery, Jackie had made such a fuss about the high fat content of ham—all while glancing down at my stomach—that I’d not bought any. “Hey!” I said. “You take photos, so why don’t you photograph all this”—I waved my hand—“and auction it over eBay?”
“Before or after I research a book for you?” She put two potato pancakes (cooked in some no-calorie spray) on my plate. “Before or after I get an auctioneer to clean the excess furniture out of this house? Before or after I cook three meals a day for you?”
“I’ll have to get back to you on that,” I said as I bent my head and filled my mouth with food.
After breakfast, I suggested we also buy a dishwasher and hire someone to install it.
“Good idea,” Jackie said, drying her hands on a paper towel. “And when do we start trying to find out about the devil story?”
“Let’s talk about it in the car,” I said, and minutes later we were driving.
I must say that buying things with Jackie made me remember my childhood. She was as in awe of spending money as I had been when I was a kid—or I was at her age, before my books were published.
Jackie’s delight at being able to buy several major appliances at once was infectious. She made me understand how good dirty old men felt at buying their young mistresses bags full of jewelry. We bought vacuum cleaners (one for each floor), lots of knobs for the kitchen cabinets, and enough cleaning supplies and equipment for a hospital. I was getting bored until we got to the gardening and tool section where I felt more comfortable.
“I thought you hated machines,” she said, leaning against a shelf and flipping through a book on landscaping.
I didn’t answer but just smiled.
“What?!” she said.
“I never said that so you must have read my books.”
“Never said I didn’t,” she replied, wedging the book into the already-full cart. “Who’s going to do the cleaning and the gardening? And don’t look at me. And, by the way, you still haven’t told me how much you’re paying me or what my hours are.”
“Twenty-four/seven. And what’s the minimum wage now?” I said, just to see her sputter.
But she didn’t sputter. Instead, she turned around and started walking toward the front door of the store. She was moving so fast the big glass entrance doors had slid open before I caught her arm. “Okay, so what do you want?”
“Nine to five, twenty dollars an hour.”
“Okay,” I said. “But are you on or off the clock at breakfast and dinner?”
After a look of disgust, she shrugged. “Who knows? I can’t figure out anything about this job.”
“Excuse me,” said a woman loudly.
Jackie and I were blocking the exit and the woman wanted out, so we stepped aside.
“Okay,” I said quietly. “How about a grand a week and we play the hours by ear? If you want time off I’ll stay home and take care of the furniture.”
I got a tiny smile out of her at my joke, and we went back to our overloaded cart.
I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why I was putting up with her cantankerousness. I hadn’t put up with anything from the other women who’d worked for me. One second of bad temper and they were out of there.
But each time Jackie bit my head off, I remembered her story about the Pulitzer prize. That had been insightful and creative. And I remembered the way that lovely little Autumn had sat down in the middle of the room and cried—and I wondered if she’d done it just to get Jackie to tell a story. If so, what other stories had Jackie told?
As I looked at weed whackers, I thought, Jackie can research the devil story and I’ll research Jackie.
We had lunch at a fast-food place, where Jackie had a salad and I had about four pounds of sandwich and curly fries. Through the whole meal, I could tell she was dying to lecture me on fat and cholesterol.
By two, we were on our way back to that monstrosity of a house, the car loaded nearly to the ceiling, appliances to be delivered tomorrow, when I couldn’t resist telling her she should eat more. It was like I’d turned the crank and the jack-in-the-box sprang out. She started in on arteries and saturated fat until I was yawning and wished I’d not said anything.
But we both came alert when I drove around a hairpin curve and there before us was an overturned car. In front of it were four laughing teenagers, obviously laughing in relief that they hadn’t been hurt in the accident.
For a second both Jackie and I sat frozen to our seats; we were seeing her dream come to life. The next second we had thrown open the car doors and were screaming, “Get away from the car!”
The four teenagers turned to look at us, dazed from having just been tumbled about, but they didn’t move.
When Jackie started to run toward the kids, I ran after her. What the hell was she going to do? Get torn apart with them?
I don’t think it occurred to me to doubt that, any second, that car was going to blow up, and anything near it was going to be sliced into pieces. When I reached Jackie, I grabbed her by the waist and held her on my hip like a sack of cornmeal. Even in that position, she didn’t stop screaming at the kids, nor did I, but I wasn’t going to let her get any closer to that belly-up vehicle.
Maybe it was that I wouldn’t get closer to the car or that I wouldn’t let Jackie run toward them, that finally got through to one of the kids. A big, good-looking boy with lots of black hair finally seemed to understand what Jackie and I were saying and moved into action. Grabbing one of the girls, he nearly threw her across the road, where she began rolling down the steep hillside. The other boy grabbed the hand of the girl beside him and started running.
Like something in a movie, the three kids leaped toward the far side of the road just as the car exploded.
I got behind the safety of a big rock, holding Jackie’s trim little body against mine, and covering her head with my arms. I bent my head and ducked under an overhang of tree roots.
The sound of the explosion was terrifying, and the brilliance of the light made me close my eyes so tight they hurt.
It was all over in seconds, then we heard pieces of steel falling onto the road, and the car began to burn. Still holding Jackie, I waited to see if it was really over.
“I can’t breathe,” she said, struggling to lift her head.
It was finally hitting me that she’d seen all of this. And her prophetic dream had just saved the lives of four kids.
She seemed to know what I was thinking because when she pushed away and looked at me, her face was beseeching. “I didn’t know the dream was real. I’ve never had anything like this happen to me before. I—”
She cut off when one of the boys came over to say thanks for saving their lives. It was the boy whose fast actions had saved all of them. “How did you know?” he asked.
I could feel Jackie looking at me. Did she think I was going to betray her? “I saw a spark,” I said. “By the gas tank.”
“I sure do thank you,” he said, putting out his hand to shake as he introduced himself as Nathaniel Weaver.
“Let’s call the police from your cell phone,” Jackie said. There was so much gratitude in her voice that I didn’t dare look at her or I would have turned red in embarrassment.
In the end, it took the rest of the day to straighten everything out. The girl Nate had thrown—“Like a football,” she said, looking up at the boy with eyes full of hero worship—had a broken arm so I drove her to the hospital while Jackie stayed with the other three kids until the police arrived. The police gave her and the kids a ride home.
After the girl’s parents arrived at the hospital, I drove back to the scene of the explosion and looked around. The wrecked car had been towed away, but I picked up a piece of metal from the side of the road and sat down by the rock that had protected Jackie and me from flying metal.
For the last two years I’d been reading ghost and witch stories that were littered with tales of fortune-tellers and people who could see the future. This morning Jackie had told me of a dream of something that was going to happen. Yet she said she’d never glimpsed the future before.
Was it just my writer’s imagination or was there a connection between the fact that Jackie had returned to a place she seemed to remember and her dream of the future?
A pickup truck going by brought me out of my thoughts. My car was still loaded with mops and brooms and a microwave, and tomorrow a truckload of appliances was to be delivered. I had to leave.