The Good House Page 44

  “For Art’s sake, I’d better not. Legally speaking, it’s best if I don’t hear too much. Think of this as old friends jawing, nothing official. You all right, Angie?”

  “How is he?” Angela asked Rob, ignoring the question she’d be lying to answer yes to.

  Her terror must have shown on her face, because Rob leaned toward her, touching her elbow, and Rob wasn’t prone to physical gestures. Right after Corey died, there had been many times she’d wished he was, because the news he gave had always been blunt and hard.

  Rob shrugged, his eyes misting. “Some ways, good. Some ways, bad. You’ll see.”

  “You don’t have to go in there, Angie,” Myles said. He wrapped an arm around Angela’s waist, hugging her against him, and she clung to him, grateful.

  “Yes, I do, baby,” she said. She reached into her pocketbook and retrieved one of her remaining quarter-sized charms, holding it out to Rob. “I need to give this to Art.”

  Rob took it, held it up to the fluorescent light above them to examine it. His face soured. “Sorry. It’s a choking hazard, or he could break it to make a sharp point. I can’t let you do that.”

  Angela had expected Rob to say that, but disappointment made her fear more keen. “Will you keep it, then?” she said. “Those are Gramma Marie’s symbols. For luck.”

  Rob looked puzzled, then he noticed the similar charm around Myles’s neck. She saw condescension in his eyes when he looked at Myles, and she wondered if Myles’s eyes had warned him,Just humor her, man, ’cause you know how it is, her being nuts and all. Runs in the family .

  Rob slipped the pendant into his breast pocket, looking at Angela with amused warmth. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll give it to Melanie. She’ll be glad to wear anything from Mrs. T’saint.”

  The conference room was as small as a crypt, one table and four chairs crammed in a too-small space, and Art sat at the table at the far wall, his hands cuffed in front of him in a pose that looked like a prayer. He was wearing his glasses, his head resting at an angle on his knuckles, staring toward the door, waiting. The pine-green inmate’s uniform he wore made him look like a surgeon.

  Art sat up straight when she walked in. He was so happy, his face broke into something that was supposed to be a smile, but twisted his mouth into a terrible grimace instead. His skin looked loose on his face. She tried not to look at his eyes, but she couldn’t help it. His eyelids fluttered when he spoke, evidence of the effort it took him. “Angie…thanks for coming. Thanks s-so much.”

  Those eyes seared her. They were Art Brunell’s eyes, unaltered. Nearly insane with pain.

  “Yes, Angie. Thank you,” Liza breathed behind her.

  Liza’s nose and upper lip were bright red, her eyes glassy and anxiously wide. She was standing against the wall opposite Art, her arms wrapped around herself. Her baggy clothes were mismatched, an afterthought, and her hair looked as if she’d just finished a long hike in the rain.

  “Oh, sweetie. I didn’t expect to find you here today,” Angela whispered, hugging Liza. Her friend leaned hard, shuddering. Angela heard her sob softly, immobile in her arms.

  “I can’t help it,” Liza said, a whimper. “I love this sonofabitch, Angie.”

  Angela hugged her more tightly, swaying with her, feeling the pain flowing from Liza’s fevered skin. Liza had given her this same hug after Corey, she realized. The uncanniness of the mirrored moment made Angela screw her eyes shut from the memory, fighting off the temptation to sag to the floor. Liza needed her today. This was Liza’s time to sag.

  But maybe Liza was stronger than she’d been. When it had been her turn, Angela had not been here for Tariq. She’d lost her mind when she’d seen that gun. She could have survived Corey’s death without The Harbor, finding shelter in Tariq’s shared grief, but the gun had been there when it had no business being there, and she had blamed Tariq because he’d been the closest one to blame. She hadn’t wanted to ask herself the uglier questions Liza must be asking herself now.

  Like Myles, she hadn’t allowed herself to see it.

  “W-we don’t have long, Angie,” Art said, with an almost inaudible stammer in a voice that was otherwise measured, nearly unchanged except that it sounded so weary. “I’ve got to talk while I still can. We’re on the clock.” He sounded so much like himself, she forgot everything for a moment. Like Rob had said, it felt like old friends jawing. But as soon as she saw his eyes again, she remembered why she would never want to be the person living behind that abyss.

  Holding Liza’s hand, Angela walked to the white plastic chair in front of Art’s table. All of the chairs looked like picnic chairs, probably so they couldn’t be used as weapons. This room was claustrophobic, with no windows, not even a window in the door so the others could see inside. Their only link to Rob was an intercom on the wall beside the door, where Liza had been standing when they’d walked in. Angela sat, and Myles stood behind her, his hands gripping her shoulders. Liza sat in the empty chair beside Art, covering his folded hands with hers. When her nose began to run in a thin stream, she wiped her nose on her shirtsleeve, not letting go of him.

  “Angie, b-break out one of those cigarettes?” Art said, sounding like he hated to trouble her.

  “Sure.” Angela had forgotten about the carton. She opened it and dug out a pack. “I don’t know if he sent matches….”

  “I brought a lighter,” Liza said, searching in her pocket.

  “I’ve been jonesing since last night. First thing I asked for was a cigarette,” Art said, and Angela noticed how much Art’s hands were shaking, his fingers hugging each other for support. “Hell of a thing, I’ll tell you, because I don’t smoke. Only that one time…Liza, remember that?”

  “Yeah, in Tacoma. We smoked a pack at the Pink Floyd concert.” Liza smiled faintly, wrapped in the recollection. “We were what, Art? Nineteen? Smoking cigarettes because we couldn’t find any grass. We coughed ’til we had tears in our eyes.”

  Art didn’t seem to have heard her; he was focused solely on Angela’s fingers as she tore the plastic from one of the packs. “The guard gave me a couple smokes last night, but they weren’t Marlboros. Theyhave to be Marlboros,” Art said, shaking his head to emphasize the point, as if he couldn’t understand how anyone could think otherwise. “Rob’s a godsend. If not for him, I don’t know w-what I’d…” Art paused, thinking better of whatever he’d wanted to say. Angela saw a shadow emerge in his face, something that wanted to steal him back to his pain. While Art clamped a trembling cigarette between his lips, Liza lit it for him, and Art held it with both of his hands, drawing in the smoke. He closed his eyes, and Angela waited for him to exhale. It was a long wait.

  Too long.

  As casually as she could, Angela pulled against Myles’s protective grip so she could learn forward, closer to Art. To try to smell him. Finally, a cloud of smoke billowed from Art’s mouth, the last in the shape of a perfectO. But he smelled fine. The rankness was gone.

  “Look at that—I can blow smoke-rings now. Did you see that, Liza?” Art said.

  “I saw it.” With the wide-eyed look of a child seeing a falling star, Liza stared up at the dissipating smoke as it elongated and fractured. Art watched it with her, equally transfixed.

  “This is just one more thing, Angie, the cigarettes,” Art said, once the smoke ring was gone. “I feel like I’m dying without them, but that’s just a teeny thing, really. I wish I knew what to do about mystomach.” He blinked painfully, and took another long drag on his cigarette. “Jesus God, it hurts.”

  “I know,” Angela said.My stomach’s not right today, man. The memory of Corey’s voice locked Angela’s elbows against her chair’s armrests. Her precious baby had been in trouble, showing all the signs, and she hadn’t known. She hadn’t seen them. She hadn’t been able to help.

  Art went on. “Well, what the fuck? If I stop trying to remember, I think the pain goes away. If I talk, I feel like I’ve got a spike stuck through my gut. Some choice, h
uh? Eenie meenie miney moe.” An unspoiled part of Art was trying to make a joke and failing, the way Art so often did.

  Liza squeezed his knuckles, sniffling again. “Tell her what you told me, Art.”

  “I want this cocksucker dead,” Art said, his mirth gone in an impossible instant. His voice rustled in his throat like dry brush. “You follow, Angie? I want this devil cunt sent back to Hell. This is the only way I can hurt it back.” His voice shot up an octave on the last three words, but he swallowed several times, composing himself. “I saw it. I had towatch . Itwanted to make me watch. So this is my fight, and it’s all I’ve got, Angie. Hating this thing is all that’s left of Art Brunell.”

  Art seemed spent, momentarily. He hung his head, wiping strands of his thinning hair across his scalp. Most of his hair was pushed to one side, uneven. She saw perspiration gleaming on his crown. Miraculously, though, although his jowls trembled, he did not sob. Liza, beside him, had closed her eyes, her face so stricken it looked as if it were sinking from her bones.

  “This was a very bad idea,” Myles said gently, in Angela’s ear. “We should go.”

  It was tempting to see this visit through Myles’s eyes, casting Art as a psychopath in the full throes of a mental collapse. That was how she wished she could see it, too. Angela had hoped something would shatter her fledgling belief in curses and invisible predators, because she liked the world better without them. Myles’s conviction that Tariq or some vandal had thrown leaves in Gramma Marie’s house and poured blood on her cellar floor was comforting, one she’d hoped might redeem itself one day. But she couldn’t see Art’s face and hold on to her illusions.

  He was ready to give her a report on where he’d been. What had taken him.

  “What does it want, Art?” she said.

  Art’s eyes looked saddened, if it were possible. “You, Angie.”

  To Angela, it almost seemed that she heard Art’s words before he spoke, an effect exactly like hearing him say it twice. Her limbs shivered, so much that Myles must have felt her tremor where his hands held on to her. “Then why did it do that to you? Why did—”

  “To hurt you. For sport. To punish anyone who tries to help you see it’s there. All of the above. It’s not real picky about the reasons.”

  Myles sighed impatiently, shifting behind Angela’s chair. Silence fell on the room while Art took in more smoke. He was midway through his first cigarette already, gobbling it with his long draws he held in his lungs too long, but never coughing. His cheeks hollowed as he inhaled.

  “Your friend Naomi,” Art said finally, hoarse.

  “What about Naomi?” Angela hadn’t been prepared to hear Naomi’s name from Art’s lips. It sounded like a desecration.

  “We got her,” Art said, nodding to make sure she knew he had spoken the word deliberately. He breathed out again, fanning smoke across the table.“We. He. It. It’s all the same, or it was. I dreamed the whole thing yesterday, before it let me go. In the dream,I was the one it sent to her.I was the one who stuffed her in the trunk of a junk car on a farm in south Vancouver, and let me tell you, she’s as dead as they come. Her brain hemorrhaged when she got hit with the gun, and a dry-cleaning bag stopped her breathing. A bag from the hotel. I used to know exactly where she is, I think, but I don’t anymore. I tried to hang on to it, but it’s gone now. I’m sorry, munchkin.”

  Oddly, he didn’t sound sorry. There was a shading of playfulness to Art’s words that chilled Angela, beyond the horrible information he conveyed. Almost as if part of him enjoyed telling her.

  “Angie, don’t listen to this,” Myles said, alarmed and angry. He slipped his hand beneath her armpit, trying to lift her to her feet.

  “Myles,hush,” Angela snapped, pulling herself free. If she didn’t press on now, she might lose herself to the grief she’d aborted when she heard Art say the wordsShe’s as dead as they come . “What else? Who’s next?”

  “Tariq,” Art said.

  “What about Tariq?”

  “It ate Tariq. Ate him slow. It was harder for it to get Tariq, him being so far away, but it’s strong, like I said. It used the bus he left—the bus was on its grounds—and it got to him that way. Objects we’ve had a long time, they carry parts of us….” He shook his head, exasperated. “All the whys aren’t important. Tariq is gone now. That’s what you need to know. He killed Naomi.”

  “Is Tariq coming here?” she said.

  “He’s already here.”

  Angela’s legs tensed, cramping. “Where?” she said.

  “It wouldn’t let me see that. But you’ll find him. He’ll come to you.” Art’s eyelids were fluttering again, harder now, as if they were trying to fly from his face.

  “What happened to Corey?” Angela said.

  “Corey woke it up,” Art said, sighing. The fluttering stopped.

  “How?”

  Art’s face wrenched in pain, and he paused, shifting in his seat. “Marie put it to sleep, but Corey found something he wasn’t supposed to. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, as they say. Corey learned enough to get in trouble. Marie expected you to bury the cocksucker for good, but something happened and she couldn’t find you. Something about the ring. It was out of place.”

  Angela blinked as tears flooded her eyes. She couldn’t speak.

  Art went on. “You didn’t have the ring, and something was blocking your dreams. End of story. When she tried to talk to you, the dreams strayed. They went to Corey. He was more open. Closer to his spirit self.”

  Angela nodded, nearly blind in her tears. She fought to speak. “How do I fight it?”

  Art half-chuckled. “Fight it? Good luck. The ring protects you, but it isn’t everything. The ring only makes it work harder. It won’t keep you alive, I’m sorry to say.” He still sounded too indifferent. Maybe from where Art had been, it was all the same one way or the other. One death here, one death there. His son was gone, so nothing else mattered quite as much.

  “What do I have to do?” she said.

  Art pulled on the cigarette again, wretched eyes honing on her. “When it comes for you, kill it. You’ll know it by the smell. You didn’t always, but Marie’s helping you with that. She’s helping you when she can. You’ll probably have to kill the body, and once you’ve done that, you have to kill thething . It’s not of flesh. It’s stronger now than it’s ever been. And it hides. I don’t think it wants me anymore. Too much trouble. But it can walk without a body to carry it. And you can’t run from it, not once it’s got a bug up its ass for you. Like Naomi couldn’t run. The safest place for you is on your property. Just like Marie. You wait, and you kill it.”

  “Art,how?” Angela said, rising to her feet. “How do I kill it?”

  “The body’ll die like any body does. That’s the easy part. The rest, Marie will show you.As long as you keep the ring. But she’s not as strong as she wanted to be, or this little situation we have here wouldn’t have gone so far bad. This wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Butc’est la vie.”

  The ring again. Yes, Angela had always known she was supposed to keep Gramma Marie’s ring. When she had discovered Gramma Marie’s ring was gone—when she’d walked into her bedroom and seen the broken glass and the mess on the floor,knowing it would be gone because it was the only thing worth taking—Angela had stopped believing she could have anything in the world. In that light, everything afterward had made sense. Tariq going to Oakland. Corey running after him. Corey dying. She wasn’t supposed to have a goddamned thing.

  “You may not win, Angie,” Art said.

  “But I might?”

  “Might.”

  It was a small word, not the least comforting. But it was all she had.

  “Art…what is it?” she said, because she had to know.

  Art’s breathing seized, and he doubled over, clutching his stomach. Liza let out a cry, leaning over him while she rubbed his back with soothing strokes. Art raised his eyes to Angela’s, his upper torso shaking as if he were carryi
ng a refrigerator on his back. Already, his eyes were beginning to look like a stranger’s again, like the man who’d told her the day before yesterday that he’d worked up a mighty appetite taking Glenn fishing.

  “A spirit,” Art said. “In your woods. Some of them…arewonderful” —he blinked as if he saw celestial lights, his eyes alone illuminated in a sunken face that was suddenly pale, sickly—“but they live alongside…the other ones. This one was too wild, banished. The Chinook buried it because it liked…death. It brought disease. They wouldn’t speak its name. But Marie…Marie…”

  Art nearly spat Gramma Marie’s name, as if it left a bad taste in his mouth, then he shook his head. He couldn’t finish. He slumped in his chair, trying to catch his breath. “I don’t remember. I d-don’t remember, Angie. It doesn’t want me to.Shit , it hurts. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Liza…Jesus, honey, I’m so sorry.”

  As Art spoke, smoke drifted from his lips in an unfailing stream. This time, it didn’t smell like cigarette smoke to Angela; it smelled like charred flesh. Art’s chin fell to his chest and he closed his eyes. Even when she could hardly tell if he was breathing, the smoke still appeared from his mouth, clouding his face, showing no sign of abating.