The Good House Read online

  The window seat in this room, like the ones in the master bedroom and the hallway, opened up to reveal a cranny beneath the seat, she remembered. Angela wasn’t sure if Corey had known the space was there, but she felt an overpowering desire to see if anything was inside. Somethingwas inside. For the first time since her Fourth of July party, Angela felt genuine intuition.

  Angela moved the items on the window seat carefully to the floor, clearing the cushion. That done, she gripped the whitewashed wood beneath the upholstered padding and lifted with both hands.

  Angela gaped. And gaped more, her eyes traveling from one end of the space to the other.

  A white towel lay there, spread out with one stone at each corner, as if to hold it in place. A white bowl from the kitchen sat in the center, with a discoloration that told her it had probably been full for some time, the water slowly evaporating. Beside that, she saw an oft-burned white candle, half-melted, with a charred wick. There was some kind of tarnished saint’s medal with a faded blue ribbon. And a photograph.

  Her fingers trembling, Angela reached down to bring the photograph closer to her face, so she could be sure what she was seeing: It was a picture of Corey at three years old, grinning in the arms of snow-haired Gramma Marie. Her face was already thinning out, the way it had much more in the little time she had left to live when this picture was taken.

  Christmas 1988. Two years before Gramma Marie died.

  It was an altar. Gramma Marie had kept altars in her bedroom, with candles galore, pictures of Jesus, and all kinds of trinkets, although she had never explained the meaning of the altars to Angela beyond saying it was the place where she prayed. Gramma Marie had often left bowls of water sitting around the house, too, both on her nightstand and on top of the refrigerator, meant to serve as some kind of blessing. Warding off evil. It had always seemed silly to Angela.

  Angela put the photograph back, noticing three paper bags crammed in the corner of the cranny, beyond the towel’s border. All of the bags were wrapped tightly at the mouth, although the one closest to her was the most loose. Angela took that one first, and it was heavier than it looked. She peeked inside. It was half-filled with dark soil.

  The second bag was lighter, spotted with faded dots of grease at the bottom. This one was full of dried chicken bones. No gristle or meat. Just bones.

  “Jesus help,” Angela said, surprised. Her spine vibrated, singing from the massage of invisible cold fingers. Cautiously, she brought the bag to her nose, sniffing. Just dryness and the vaguest memory of flesh. Any maggots’ work was long finished. These were old bones.

  Confused, Angela unrolled the crumpled mouth of the third bag—and this time a black feather suddenly poked out at her. Angela dropped the bag with a gasp, falling onto her backside, her palms steadying her against the floor.

  The bag lay on the floor before her, stock-still. Several black bird feathers had spilled onto the floorboards, but the movement had been her imagination, she decided. This bag was just filled with feathers. Raven feathers.

  This must be one of Gramma Marie’s old altars. This altar was crude, not nearly as lush as her old bedroom altar. Angela had regretted not leaving Gramma Marie’s altar intact, and now she’d accidentally unearthed one she had never seen. She checked the space one more time, and she found a stack of index cards bound by a red rubber band. She’d almost missed the cards because they were upright, leaning against the side closest to her, nearly out of her vision. She unwound the rubber band. Each card had a single symbol drawn in black Magic Marker. A triangle. A double-squiggle. These symbols looked familiar to her. Where had she seen them?

  The answer was on her left ring finger, she realized. Gramma Marie’s ring.

  Angela compared the markings on her ring to those on the index cards, a dozen in all, and each symbol had a match, even if some were rendered less convincingly than others. The cards were hand-numbered, and Angela suddenly recognized the looping numerals. When she did, she felt what seemed like a stab of electricity.

  This was Corey’s handwriting, not Gramma Marie’s. Jesus, was thisCorey’s altar?

  Sitting alone in the bright stillness of her son’s bedroom, Angela held her breath. Corey had asked her about the symbols on her ring the day he died. She couldn’t remember his exact words, but he had asked if the symbols had power. By God, he had. He had.

  Angela didn’t know what it meant, but she knew it was important. This mattered, and the fact that it mattered was slowly but surely scaring the hell out of her. Condoms and profane CDs were one thing, but Corey had been hiding a part of himself she hadn’t known a trace of. How had he learned to make an altar? Gramma Marie had died before she’d had a chance to teach him, and Gramma Marie had never taught her or her mother anything significant about hervodou roots, so why would she teach Corey? And if not her, then who?

  Raising herself onto her knees to gaze back into the heart of the window seat’s cavity, Angela surveyed the assortment of objects inside with growing trepidation. Her eyes couldn’t leave the photograph of Gramma Marie and Corey that he must have placed there himself, for a reason she couldn’t fathom. Gramma Marie looked old and tired, almost too weary to smile, and pudgy-cheeked Corey was bursting with the joy of new life. The two of them were posed together, their cheeks pressed close, frozen in time.

  WE HAVE FUCKED UPBIG, Corey’s note said.

  Angela had a firm inkling who the “we” was. And although it was terrible timing, she was going to find every scrap of information she could about her son’s last few weeks of life. She’d asked questions once before, long ago, and gotten nowhere.

  This time, she had gotten somewhere already.

  Ten

  THE DOUGH-FACED WOMANwho answered the door looked harried and distrustful, as if she were accustomed to unprovoked cruelties from strangers. She did not smile, and although she was probably no older than Angela, her forehead was already deeply grooved with lines.

  “I’m your neighbor,” Angela said. “I brought some things for Sean. He and my son were friends. I’m so sorry about what happened.”

  The woman’s smallish eyes were dull, unresponsive. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Would it be possible for me to talk to Sean?”

  The woman stepped aside. Her profile made her look heavier, with most of her weight carried behind her. “Come on in. He’s in his room,” she said.

  Angela took a quick glance around the trailer before she followed the woman’s pointing finger. She saw dishes piled precariously high in the sink in the kitchen near the entryway, and in the living room two young children who looked eight and ten were sitting in front of the television set. The little girl’s thick glasses reflected the television screen, and the darker-skinned boy, who was older and taller, had an uneven Afro in dire need of either trimming or combing. His hair must be a mystery to whomever was grooming him, Angela thought. Neither of the children glanced in her direction, transfixed by after-school television.

  Sean’s room was the first bedroom to her right, recognizable by the posters plastering the door and the raucous squeal of a rock guitar from inside. Angela knocked.

  “I turned it down already!” came an annoyed shout. He might as well have been Corey.

  “Sean, it’s me, Corey’s mother. Angela Toussaint.”

  After an instant, the music vanished in mid-riff. The door flung open, and Sean stood there with hair hanging over his eyes. His hair was shaggier than Angela remembered it, closer to the way his father had worn it. Sean had also grown substantially. He was six feet and rangy, towering.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” she said, smiling sadly. “I’m so sorry about your dad.”

  Sean flipped his hair away from his eyes, resting his palm against his forehead. He gazed at her for a moment with an unreadable expression, more than simple surprise. “Yeah. Come in,” he said, and he closed the door behind her.

  Sean Leahy’s room was a disaster. The floor had a few clear spots, but every other space was co
vered with clothes, concert posters, books, traffic signs, naked store mannequins with bizarre body paint, or charcoal sketches, all of it marked with the scent of tobacco. Sean dumped a pile of clothes from his folding metal desk chair and turned it around to offer her the seat. Then, he sagged down onto his bed.

  Angela sat, too. “I was going through Corey’s room, and I found a few CDs I thought you might want. I remember how much you both enjoy music. I wasn’t sure what to bring you, so maybe you can come to his room sometime and find something else you’d like.”

  Angela had brought Sean ten of Corey’s CDs, mostly the ones with the explicit lyrics, because she couldn’t bring herself to part with anything else, even music she had never heard of. Now, in Sean’s presence, she felt magnanimous. She wanted to do something more for him.

  “That’s nice of you. I bet that was hard to do,” Sean said. He looked inside the bag only briefly after resting it on the floor between his legs.

  “Corey would want this.”

  She’d hoped the gift would relax him, but after his initial probing gaze, the boy was not making eye contact with her. He wasn’t obvious about it, but he only glanced at her at short intervals before his eyes went to the wall behind her or to the floor. Anywhere but back to her face.

  “You’re going through a horrible time,” Angela said.

  A short sigh, but no answer.

  “I’m really so sor—”

  “Shit happens, huh? Excuse my language.”

  This was not the same carefully mannered boy who had visited her home and spent so much time discussing the books in her library with her, Corey’s cheerful companion. Sean was skittish and distant, and Angela got the feeling that if she didn’t come to her point soon, he would ask her to leave. From experience, she knew grief left little room for hospitality.

  “What happened to your dad is awful,” she said, “but I wanted to talk to you about Corey.”

  Sean shifted his body weight, rubbing the back of his neck. His pale blue eyes skipped toward her, then away. “What about him?”

  Angela reached into the back pocket of her jeans and pulled out the index cards marked with the symbols from her ring. This was a long shot, she knew, but it was the quickest way to answer the most troubling question that had arisen from her visit to Corey’s room. She extended the cards to him. “Would you look at these and tell me…”

  But Sean was on his feet. He held his palms up like he was being robbed, stumbling away from her. “I don’t want those.”

  Angela paused, surprised by his reaction. “You know what these are?”

  Sean didn’t answer. His jaw had gone hard, resolute. This was the same way Sean had behaved when she and Sheriff Rob Graybold had questioned him right after Corey’s death, volunteering nothing with a cornered look in his eyes.

  “Put those away,” Sean said, his voice at the barest edge of civility. It nearly scared her.

  “All right, I’m putting them away,” she said. She stuffed the cards back into her pocket, out of sight. “See? They’re gone.”

  Sean eyed her warily, then sat again, clasping his hands between his knees. He was silent for a minute or longer. Angela sat in silence, waiting him out.

  Sean rubbed his fingers together absently, probably craving a cigarette. “I didn’t know you were back here until Mr. Fisher came over yesterday,” Sean said. “He brought Dad’s basket. There’s a dog missing or something?”

  “Yes. My friend Naomi’s dog disappeared overnight. I’m still looking for him.”

  “That dog’s history.”

  The certainty in his voice chilled her. If she were a police officer, she would have been sure Sean had something to do with Onyx’s disappearance. But it wasn’t that, not exactly. It was something else. “Why do you say that?”

  Sean shook his head, but didn’t speak.

  “You have something you want to tell me, Sean.”

  “You’re not safe over there. If I’d known you were thinking about coming back, I would have called you and told you no way. Everything about that land you have is fucked up. I told Dad, too, but he didn’t listen.”

  “Well, I’m listening.”

  Sean leaned back on the mattress, propping himself on his elbows. He thought, then sighed. “Dad rode over there a couple of weeks ago, early on a Saturday morning. He came back all shaken up, and he didn’t have his basket with him, but he wouldn’t say why. He said he didn’t feel good, a stomachache or something. I said, ‘I told you so, didn’t I?’ He was out of it for a couple of days, then he seemed all right. A week later, he was dead.”

  “I know. It’s horrible, Sean. But why do you think that has something to do with my land?”

  His eyes swept up to hers again, searing. “Because I know.”

  “Buthow do you know, Sean?”

  “Corey and I both knew it. We were gonna try to fix it, but we ran out of time.”

  “I don’t understand. What were you going to try to fix?”

  For the first time, Sean looked near tears. Years melted from his face.

  “What we did.”

  Angela felt a cold breeze bathe her as she remembered the words WE HAVE FUCKED UPBIG. Her brain suddenly flickered with a macabre image of Sean and her son burying a body in the woods, their shovels chomping into the soil.

  “What did you do, Sean?”

  He pursed his lips, not answering.

  “I’m not going to get you in trouble. I just need to know,” she said.

  “We pissed it off.”

  “You pissed what off?”

  He blinked, and dropped his head. “Your land.” It was a whisper.

  Angela struggled to make connections, and it was like trying to see in a blizzard. “You…think you did something to the land?” Sean didn’t affirm what she’d said, but he didn’t deny it either, so she went on. “And what you did had something to do with the symbols on the cards?”

  “We were just playing around. Corey found some stuff about spells, and he figured out how to get you your ring back. Then it got way out of hand.”

  Spells. The image of a secret burial forgotten, Angela felt herself hiding Gramma Marie’s ring from sight beneath her palm, feeling protective. “My grandmother’s ring? The one he wrote the girl in California to get back?”

  Sean glanced at her sidelong, grinning weakly. “Is that what he told you?”

  “What really happened, then?”

  “He lost your ring a long time ago, when he was a little kid. With the spells, we figured out how to bring back lost things. There’s a way to do it, you know. You use this saint’s medal, St. Anthony. Anyway, that was how it started. Like I said, we were just playing around, no big deal, but it got out of hand. Now it’s all pretty well fucked, and we didn’t have a chance toun -fuck it. So, yeah, that dog’s gone. And Corey is gone. And my dad is gone. And you’ll be gone, too, if you don’t go back to California the first chance you get.” He peered at her hard, almostthrough her. “Stay away from that house, Mrs. Toussaint. And especially The Spot. Leave and don’t come back.”

  Jesus, this child was certifiably delusional, Angela thought, despite his echoes of Naomi’s identical warning. Had Corey fallen into a similar delusion? She’d seen what looked like a saint’s medal beneath the window seat, in the cavity, so Sean wasn’t making this up. Not all of it, anyway. He sounded like someone who’d fallen victim to a cult. What hadhappened to these boys in the space of a few weeks, a single summer?

  “Sean, did someone tell you something is wrong with my land?”

  “Nobody had to tell us shit. We weren’t blind. You’re the one who’s blind, Mrs. Toussaint.” He was mumbling, not looking at her again.

  The first chance she got, Angela decided, she was going to talk to Myles about convincing Sean Leahy to see a psychiatrist. The other two kids probably needed serious therapy, too. Something had been ruptured in this household, and whatever had happened here might have crept into her house, too. Into Corey. Why hadn’t she
seen it before?

  Angela’s heart slammed her chest. “Sean, did Corey ever talk about killing himself?”

  Sean shook his head.

  “Did he ever show you that gun or tell you where he got it?”

  Again, the answer was no, assuming he was telling the truth, and Angela felt relieved at the small comfort. At least this boy hadn’t had any part in helping Corey carry out his death. It was a horrid thought, but in the bizarre turn of their conversation, that scenario had occurred to her, too.