The Good House Read online

“That was day, Myles, and this is night. I spent three months at a hospital, but that was only because I didn’t want to uphold family tradition and hurt myself. I shut down my heart and let some other folks take care of me for a while. That has nothing to do with this. You heard what Ma Fisher said at dinner. She called me Corey. She was channeling something that talked to my son about magic once upon a time, and you still can’t see it. You don’t want to.”

  Myles didn’t respond right away. Through the wall, Angela heard Ma Fisher demanding to know where all of her socks were. She sounded furious.

  “Listen to her,” Myles said. “Doll-baby, I’ll admit my heart went pitter-pat when Ma Fisher said that about Corey. I won’t pretend I have an explanation for it. But my mother is suffering from dementia. Unfortunately for all of us, there hasn’t been a day in a long time when she hasn’t said something that doesn’t make sense. That’s who she is now. Butyou have a serious problem. Somebody came into your house and—”

  “Or something.”

  “Rob needs to be informed,” Myles said. “I should have mentioned my call from Tariq when I saw him today. I had an accident this morning, by the way. I went into a spin on the Four. So, yeah, I’m feeling jumpy and cautious, Angie. I lost control of my car right after Tariq called me.”

  Angela closed her eyes, shuddering. “Shit,” she whispered. She had known it would try to take Myles, too. She felt despair try to slip over her, a burial cloth. “Does your stomach hurt?” Angela asked, afraid to hear the answer.

  “No. Why?”

  “I think Tariq’s stomach might be hurting. He said he was going to see a doctor.”

  “You talked to him? When?” Myles leaned closer to her on the bed, reclining.

  “Tuesday morning. He left a message at my office. He sounded good, but he said he’d been sick. Art was sick, too. Did you know that? Liza said his stomach hurt the night before he killed Glenn. And Rick’s stomach hurt. You can ask Sean yourself. Corey’s did, too.”

  “What are you getting at, Angie?”

  “Your mother was brought to my grandmother’s doorstep when she was sick in 1929, and people are still getting sick today. I’m talking about an outbreak of some kind. Open your eyes.”

  Finally, Myles looked intrigued. “I’m listening. What kind of outbreak?”

  “Possession,” she said, and Myles sighed again. He would stop listening now, she knew. Still, she went on. “I don’t think it’s still inside Ma Fisher, but she has some kind of connection to it. I think that’s why she said that about Corey at dinner, and why she called me Mrs. T’saint the other day on the phone, talking about San Francisco. I think when Ma Fisher talks to me, she’s remembering old interactions with this thing, whatever it is. The memory of it is stamped on her. It echoes inside of her, maybe.” As she spoke, Angela felt her level of understanding deepening, and that gave her fleeting hope. True understanding was the only weapon she would have.

  “God, you sound sure of yourself,” Myles said, more amazed than skeptical.

  “I’m not always. But sometimes, I know things. More all the time, Myles.”

  Myles was no longer massaging her arm. Instead, he’d begun stroking her, his fingertips grazing the side of her face. The giddy arousal she’d felt last night was gone, but something more staid and calm came in its wake, a glow that made her limbs melt into the mattress.

  “As of right now, we start trusting each other,” Myles said. “I’ll grant that you might know things, but respect my hunch, too. Please, Angie. I consider Tariq to be dangerous.”

  Angela nodded. Tariq hadn’t sounded dangerous on his telephone message to her, but she didn’t know what had happened to him since then. “Agreed,” she said.

  “And I’ll say it again: Rob needs to know about that blood.”

  “Come to the house tomorrow,” Angela said. “If you still think it’s vandalism, we’ll call Rob right away. Cross my heart, Myles. Is that a good compromise?”

  “All right,” Myles said, looking relieved. “But don’t go back there now.”

  “I don’t plan to. I have a room in Longview, remember?”

  “Yes. I remember.” Myles exhaled, and his breath was as familiar as a favorite blanket. He slipped his palm beneath her sweatshirt and let it lie on her belly, pressing as if to keep her fixed in place. Tariq’s palms had always been callused from the weight room, but Myles’s palm was as smooth as a boy’s. Beneath his touch, she felt her nervous system awaken after hours of retreat. Her stomach jumped. “You could stay here,” he said, as if she’d willed the words from his mouth.

  “I thought you said that wasn’t a good idea.”

  Myles’s eyes searched hers, new pennies shining at her. “Angie, sometimes I look at you and see a woman who’s a complete wreck, and that scares the hell out of me. That’s the truth as well as I can speak it. But sometimes I see…” He shook his head.

  Myles must have made up his mind. He hoisted himself closer to her, wrapping one arm around her lower back to pull her against him. His lips glided over hers lightly, then sank hard, his tongue washing hers. Angela had kissed Myles many times before, but never as a forty-year-old man. His hungry kiss was foreign to her, as if he meant to prove to her that the timid boy she’d known was gone. Angela cupped Myles’s face between her palms as she kissed him, afraid she might hurt him from clinging too hard. Their bodies sought each other, cleaving together. His erection dug hard against her stomach through his slacks. He was as wide as the Nile, she remembered.

  Angela wrenched her mouth away. Kissing Myles had absorbed her so much that she hadn’t been taking in enough breath. “I miss you,” she said, stroking his bare scalp, feeling the fuzz of his shorn hair trying to return.

  “No need to miss me,” he said. “I’m here.”

  “Tell me everything about who you are, Myles.”

  His hand beneath her shirt scurried upward, resting on her breast. His thumb found the firmness of her waiting nipple, and he rubbed a circle atop her nylon bra that made her thighs press together, hoarding the pleasant tingling trapped between them. “What can I tell you?” Myles said.

  “Who’s the boy in that picture on your wall?”

  “That’s a very old picture of Diego, my stepson. He’s seventeen now.”

  “You were married?” Of course he must have been, but she hated the idea.

  “For three tumultuous years after grad school. I thought Marta was you. I was wrong.” Myles lifted her sweatshirt, and she watched the earnestness in his face as he stared at her bare skin, at her bra. He looked almost saddened, anxious, as his eyes traveled over her. Slowly, he lowered his head, kissing her navel. The quick, wet warmth of his mouth made her start.

  “I went running this morning. I haven’t had a shower,” Angela said, suddenly self-conscious.

  “I’ve always loved your sweet, salty funk, Angela Marie,” Myles said. He licked her stomach with his broad tongue, bathing his way upward. He freed her breasts, and his tongue found them, too. Angela’s whole frame shuddered as he swallowed her.

  Myles slid one hand past the elastic of her jogging pants, furrowing inside her panties. His fingers waded through her pubic hair, lighting gently atop her clitoris, and Angela stiffened. She was sensitive, and often Tariq’s fingers had been too rough, uncomfortable even when he tried to be gentle. Instinctively, Myles kept his touch light, so fleeting that she yearned for him to pressharder . Her hips rose, begging.

  Myles’s index finger rubbed and teased until it was inside of her, sure and deep, and she felt her body kissing him, moist. His tongue flicked one nipple while his free hand gently squeezed the other. When Myles hooked his index finger inside her as if he were beckoning, massaging her in the precise place so few men knew, Angela clamped her mouth shut and screamed in her throat, where only Myles could hear. Her pleasure astonished her so much that tears came to her eyes.

  It couldn’t touch them here, she realized, arching against Myles.

  It couldn’t t
ouch them tonight.

  Angie was half-asleep beneath his rocking, so Myles was careful not to wake her. Even dozing, she’d naturally slipped her hand to grasp him tightly as she always did, as if she planned to keep his organ for herself. Then, her hand helped guide him inside her.

  He’d found three lambskin condoms in the drawer of his nightstand, thankfully, but this was the only one that had survived their night together. He’d planned to save it until daylight, but when he’d awakened and felt Angie’s hot skin against him in the dark, he’d wanted her again. He hadn’t felt this kind of urgency since he was a teenager, and he was trembling as her warm dampness absorbed him. The condom seemed to disappear. He felt her skin against his, a fusion.

  Angie mumbled, and her internal muscles clenched like a fist, momentarily holding him in the place of her choosing. Her mastery always startled him. Myles locked his elbows, feeling himself swell in her intimate embrace. His teeth ground together as waves of longing coursed through him, tightening in his testicles, an irrepressible tide.You gasped like you’d seen your mama’s ghost, Tariq had said, and he nearly gasped again now. Only the unsettling memory of the taunting words saved Myles from expelling himself too soon.

  Myles wanted this to last. His head was quiet, the deepest kind of quiet, the kind he’d felt his first time inside Angie, when all the loose strands of the world had knitted themselves into something that made sense. At home inside Angie, he understood everything he wanted to know.

  Angie’s grip relaxed. Maybe, he thought, she had drifted to full sleep.

  Myles slowly began his strokes again, moving in quarter-inch probes, nudging inside, withdrawing at a snail’s pace, then nudging inside again until their pelvises were joined. With his chest high above her, the charm Angie had made for him dangled from his chest, swinging between them. He didn’t wear jewelry except for his gold cross, which never left his neck, so he’d nearly whipped off the leather chain a half-dozen times because it felt out of place. But he had promised Angie he would wear it, and although he’d had to bite his tongue not to tell her he had all the protection he needed from the good Lord above, he would honor that promise to her. She had made it for him. While Myles rocked inside of her, Angie’s clay charm swung on.

  Angela shifted slightly beneath him, her face still pliant in sleep, her worry gone. She made a small sound, a murmur. “I love you, Angie,” Myles said, and he thought he saw her smile. “Don’t you run from me, lady. Don’t do that again.”

  Myles didn’t know what made him turn around when he did, but two years at home with Ma had given him razor-sharp hearing. He turned over his shoulder to stare at the his door, and he was surprised to see it was open halfway. A slight figure stood in the darkness, barely visible except for a nightgown. Candace had gone home tonight, and she would never open his door without knocking.

  Myles could have sworn he’d locked that door.

  “Ma? You know you’re supposed to be in bed,” he whispered. He rolled away from Angie, tugging off the condom and covering himself. Miraculously, Angie didn’t stir. The poor girl was beat to her socks, as Pa Fisher used to say. Myles climbed into his pants, which he’d left on the floor in the past few hours’ frenzy. He was glad the room was so dark. Even if he’d had to wash and wipe Ma Fisher more times than he could count, he still didn’t want to stand naked before his mama.

  Ma Fisher stood stock-still in his doorway, one hand leaning against the frame. It wasn’t like her to be so still, or so quiet, and Myles felt a charge. As much as he fought against the wild forays of Angie’s imagination, he’d thought about it himself, and he’d heard others say the words when he visited the support group at the hospital in Longview on the days he needed fellowship:It’s like they’ve become possessed .

  “Ma, are you thirsty?” he said. He left his bedroom, closing the door behind him so they wouldn’t disturb Angie. There wasn’t enough light in the hallway to read Ma’s expression. She might be thirsty, or hungry, or afraid of the dark, or convinced there were imaginary intruders outside her window. Ma wasn’t the same wreck she’d been when every lost memory terrified her, or sent her into a rage, but she was rarely at peace. If Myles could give her one thing, it would be only that. Peace. He brushed her forehead. She was sweating. Maybe her room was too hot.

  “If you keep getting up like this, we’ll have to restrain you at night. Or send you away. I know you won’t like that. I want you to be happy as long as possible. So you have to stay in bed. Got it, Ma?”

  To her, he was only the man who lived in the house, and although she was happy to see him when he came home, she called him every name except Myles. Most often, she called him Jake, thinking he was Pa Fisher. Still, he couldn’t stare at Ma in the face and not keep talking to her the way he had since the day she’d first appeared at his group home and told him he was just the little boy she’d been looking for. Myles reached for his mother’s hand, but she snatched it away. She often did that, too. Sudden movements made her nervous.

  “Come on, Ma,” he said patiently. “Back to bed.”

  She relented, slipping her palm into his. “I’ll see you soon, Snook,” Ma said softly.

  Ma had never called him Snook, but the affectionate nickname sounded uncannily as if she were talking tohim, the way she used to. Sometimes, honest to God, he was sure of it.

  “Yes, Ma,” he told her. “You’ll see me soon.”

  Myles was in deep sleep, entwined nude around Angie, when the phone on his nightstand rang, a tranquil trilling. He bolted upright, feeling as if he had been on alert all night, waiting. The rain outside pelted his rooftop, spilling noisily into the downspouts. Angie stirred but didn’t open her eyes, frowning in the cloudy morning light creeping in through his glass door. He’d forgotten to close the blinds. He’d forgotten a lot of things last night, frankly, most of which he would probably regret in a very short time.

  Sighing, Myles slid his hand across Angela’s bare waist where it dipped above her hip, sunken and lovely, and he wondered how many more times he was likely to be able to touch her before the price was too high for any sane man to let himself be bargained up to. Angie’s exits had always been grand, and this one would be no less so. Fate had been against them from the beginning, and it was still putting up a hell of a fight.

  Myles cut off the phone’s second ring. Chaos was an early riser, he thought.

  “You told me to call you before the I call the big guys,” Rob Graybold’s voice said.

  “What’s up?” Myles croaked, glancing at his wall clock. It was only seven. This guy must never sleep, he thought.

  “Art’s ready to talk. He’s asking for Angie. He said you’d know where to find her.”

  Twenty-Six

  FRIDAY MORNING

  EVEN IN JAIL,being the mayor must have its perks, Angela thought, as Rob handed her a carton of Marlboros for Art in the hallway of the new Sacajawea County jail. Ironically, according to Myles, Art had helped raise the money to build this addition in the rear of the sheriff’s office, a fourteen-bed jail with no kitchen that had been open two months and still smelled like plaster and paint.

  Art was one of his own first customers.

  Angela’s hands were shaky, so she slid the carton under her arm to keep from dropping it. She hadn’t held a carton of Marlboros in years, since she used to buy Tariq’s from the Safeway in Hollywood Hills. More convenient by the carton, he said when she complained.

  Then, she realized the peculiarity of it. “I’ve never seen Art smoke,” she said.

  “Neither had Liza,” Rob said. “But he sure smokes now.”

  They stood outside a blue-gray door markedCONFERENCE , beside the empty holding cell where Art had been kept since his arrest. Two jail guards nearby crossed their arms and huddled close in conversation, deliberately not noticing whatever regulations Rob was flaunting by bringing Myles and Angela here instead of to the glass booths where everyone else was sent. There was barely room for all of them to stand in the narrow corr
idor.

  In the rush to leave his house that morning, Myles had put on a pair of glasses that looked exactly like his gold wire-rims from high school. Whenever Angela looked at him, she felt time vanish. “How long do we have with him?” Myles asked Rob.

  “Not long,” Rob said. “He seems all right now, but let’s play it safe. Go in for a hot minute, say your hellos, and come on back out.”

  Angela’s heart plunged, then raced. Who was the woman she’d been yesterday, methodically photographing the leaves and blood in Gramma Marie’s house? That clearheaded resolve had left her now. She could hardly make herself move, uncomforted by the guards. She wished she were back in Myles’s bed, savoring their first waking morning together. And if she couldn’t have a moment’s happiness with Myles, she’d rather be at Gramma Marie’s house than here, somehow.

  “Are you coming with us?” Angela asked Rob, noticing that he was the only one with a gun.