The Good House Read online

  It wasn’t raining on the attic stairs. Here in the narrow attic stairwell, there was peace.

  Their breathing mingled, shallow and panicked, in too much darkness. Not enough light from the attic window was reaching them at their odd angle on the stairs. “Light,” Angela whispered, a prayer. If she didn’t see light soon, she would faint from pure fear. Images of dancing leaves and flying mud glutted her mind.

  A circle of light switched on. Myles had brought a flashlight, she realized vaguely, grateful. The grooves between the planks of the wall came into sight, and everything behind the closed attic door suddenly seemed very distant. She could still hear the water falling in the hall, but it wasn’t in here. Itcouldn’t come in here, she realized.

  This was the place. This was where Gramma Marie wanted her to go.

  Behind her, Myles’s breathing was a labored wheeze; she hadn’t known until now that fear made it so hard to breathe. She climbed the stairs, toward the hazy light above them, clinging hard to the wooden pole that served as a bannister.

  “When Gramma Marie first came to work here, she and my mama had to sleep up here in the attic. The man who owned this house thought people would gossip if she lived in the main house. She was young then. Andpretty .” Angela knew she was rambling, but rambling gave her solace.

  “It’s not leaking up here,” Myles observed, ignoring her. He had gravel in his voice. He needed to understand why it was raining in the house. He didn’t know yet that he never could.

  “In summertime, it was hard to sleep up here at night,” Angela went on, feeling her fear unclogging. “All the heat collected until you couldn’t do anything but swim in it. The baby didn’t mind, but Gramma Marie would lie awake all night and wait for morning. She was just so grateful to be on the land, onthis land, she never complained. Not once. She would read by an oil lamp. And sew clothes for Mama. And cry over her husband who died. You know how I know, Myles?”

  Myles didn’t answer her. For now, he was lost from her, trapped inside his questions.

  “She never told me, but I remember it now. Iremember,” Angela whispered.

  By the time they reached the attic and the dim sunlight, Angela was blinking away tears of relief and hope. She had walked here before. Through Gramma Marie, the soles of her feet had touched these stairs before she’d been born.

  The ceiling was so low that Angela could barely stand at her full height, and Myles hunched over as he walked behind her. Dust teemed in Myles’s flashlight beam as they surveyed the space, which spanned the entire second story of the house. Boxes were piled neatly against the walls, leaving the unfinished floor almost clear. Spiderwebs swathed the corners like party decorations. Angela lifted a tarp and found a stack of wooden planks, old building materials. On the floor, there were cans of blue paint, the color of the house, the color of the closet door in the junk room.

  Gramma Marie had painted that closet door downstairs herself, Angela realized. To make it easier to find. And one small part of the wall was painted blue up here, near the attic window.

  “It’s completelydry up here,” Myles said, crouching, feeling the dusty wooden floor. “Could that water be coming from pipes below us? Is there a way Tariq could be doing that?”

  Angela didn’t answer. Let Myles surrender his logic in his own time, she thought.

  She needed to find the room where Gramma Marie slept. In her imagination, the room was no larger than a walk-in closet, with barely space enough for a bed and a chair. Angela couldn’t see a sign of any room like that now. She saw no doorways and no door the entire length of the attic.

  Instinct drew her toward the attic window, the highest point in the room. The window was in a cove, with high walls on either side. The round window stared out at Toussaint Lane below, and Angela could see the steady rain outside. The window was still cracked in at least three places, and a triangular shard of glass had fallen out, maybe during that awful clanging, that shaking of the walls.

  Angela studied the cove’s walls. She knocked on the right side. She wasn’t sure what she was listening for, but the wall felt dense against her knuckles. Next, she knocked on the left side. That knock was very different. “It’s hollow,” Myles said, noticing at the same time she did.

  “There’s a way to get in there.”

  With Myles’s beam to assist her, Angela ran her fingers along the sloping wall, looking for some kind of entrance around the left corner, outside of the cove. That brought her to the narrow section of the wall that was painted blue. A rusted, old-fashioned heating stove that looked like it weighed a hundred pounds sat in front of the wall, its steel panel inscribedOakdale Sunshine. Beside the stove, there was a three-legged gadget, some kind of butter churn. At the frailest time of her life, soon before she died, Gramma Marie had dragged these items here to protect something.

  Downstairs, the angry clang came again, and the floor trembled. Angela’s knees nearly folded beneath her. That sound was a horror.

  Only the sound of glass clinking behind the blue wall, from the hollow, helped her smother the impulse to run out of the house before it was too late. Therewas something hidden here. “L-let’s move the stove,” Angela said.

  “What are you looking for?” Myles said.

  “I don’t know. Just help me, please.”

  Myles helped her drag the stove away from the wall, knocking over the flimsy churn. A thick, knotted rope came into sight where the stove had been. Angela had to stare at the rope a moment to realize it was a door latch. She couldn’t see the door, but she saw indentations in the paint that betrayed a door that had been painted over. Angela pulled on the rope, but the door stuck.

  “Hold up,” Myles said. He took the rope, turned, and tugged. His first tug yielded nothing, but he shifted his body to put more of his weight into the pull, and his second one loosened the door. By his third try with a hard grunt, the door flung open with the strong fragrance of incense.

  This little room had a sharply sloping ceiling, and it was dark, too. “Light, Myles,” she said.

  The beam flew inside. In that instant of light, Angela saw a shock of bright colors—green pervading, but also flaming red and orange, white and gold. Colorful banners hung from the ceiling, mirroring the rainbow on the walls. An altar, she realized. Angela had thought Gramma Marie’s bedroom altar was intricate, but she could see now how reserved it had been, almost entirely lacking in color, and taking up so little space in her bedroom, on a corner table of white wicker. Gramma Marie’s true altar was almost too crowded to take in at once, its colors marvelous.

  But Angela’s eyes were drawn to a wide, six-foot wooden cross, painted red, bound with thick, heavy rope. The cross had half a human skull planted on top, with only the twining rope where the lower jaw should be. Ropes lashed the cross with upside-down bottles and a small white chair, all of it bound tight. Dusty bottles hung upside down from the cross. Rag dolls without faces swung on ropes from the ceiling, six of them dangling near the cross. The dolls were upside down, too. They looked like a nightmare come to life.

  Sweeping his flashlight over the cross, finding the skull, Myles made a sound Angela couldn’t distinguish. Disgust. Or terror. He took a step back.“Holy God. What—”

  Angela felt her heart bounding, too. Whose skull had this been? How had Gramma Marie gotten it, and what did it mean? Why was the skull on top of the cross? And what were the dolls for? One by one, the images repelled Angela. No wonder Gramma Marie had never let her see this altar, she thought. Gramma Marie’s religion was a foreign language to her, its symbols alien.

  But Gramma Marie was in this space, waiting. Angela knew that much.

  She took a step inside the room, and the potency of the incense doubled, a cloud of scents over her. Deep scents. Earthy, musky, tart, sweet scents. Sage, lavender, rosemary, cedar. The smell was so luxurious, she forgot to feel afraid. This room smelled like God.

  “Give me the flashlight, Myles,” she said.

  “Be careful,” he said
, but handed it to her, raising his hand to his nose as if the skull’s owner had died in here. She couldn’t blame him, but she wished he would come beside her and smell what the room really was. It was a celebration.

  Angela could see celebration in the bright chalk drawing on the floor, a symbol far more complex than any of those on her ring: crossed lines, four dots, bulbous ends to the vertical line, feathery flourishes at the ends of the horizontal line, a symbol that meant more than she could understand. She saw celebration in the faces painted on the wall by an amateur hand, the lines uneven and faces too big for the bodies, but nonetheless rendered with love. Brown faces against green clothing in gilded paint, with haloes and light behind their heads. Her eyes lingered a long time on the rendering of an old man with a white beard, bent over, leaning on a walking stick.

  A drum stood in the corner, Red John’s drum, another celebration. The sight of it made Angela long to hear it played. She mourned suddenly that she had never seen her grandmother dance to the drum. What a sight she’d probably been. Gramma Marie haddanced.

  Directly beneath her, Angela heard the clang again, and the floor jumped. Swinging bottles in front of her clanked together dully, and two small green ones on the floor tinkled, falling over. “Angie, I don’t like this,” Myles said behind her. “Nothing should be shaking the house that hard. That feels like it’s from theground, at the foundation.”

  Whatever kind of intuition Myles had, it was working for him, too. He was right. They would have to leave the house soon.

  “Give me a minute. Let me feel her,” Angela said.

  Angela’s flashlight beam went back to the bottles at the foot of the cross. There, between two bottles at the base, she noticed a small covered pot that looked like it was made of clay. The pot was too small to be promising as a weapon, but this was what Gramma Marie wanted her to have. Angela grabbed the earthen pot and cupped both hands around it, holding tightly.

  Agovi, she realized. She had no idea what the word meant, but agovi was what she held.

  “Done,” she said, and Myles gave her space to back out of the worship room.

  Tears crept down Angela’s face as she thought about the things she would never know about that room, about that altar. But she had rescued a piece of Gramma Marie.

  Maybe, she thought, she had rescued her grandmother’s soul.

  If a house could feel pain, Angie’s grandmother’s house was in agony. As nonsensical as the thought was, Myles couldn’t discard it as he and Angie raced down the muddy stairs from the second floor and found the chaos waiting downstairs.

  In the foyer, where dead leaves were a foot high on the floor, the grandfather clock chimed maniacally. In the living room, the player piano’s sour keys wandered up and down, playing a song with no real melody, an affront to the ear. And above them, the terrible clanging sound came every fifteen seconds now, shaking the house each time.

  But there was an explanation.There always was. He wouldn’t give in to fear, Myles vowed.

  He didn’t see Angie dart away from him. By the time he noticed that the swishing sound of her feet through the leaves was going in the wrong direction—awayfrom the front door, toward the living room—only the swinging French doors remained to tell him where she’d gone. She was in the dining room. “Angie, we have toget out of here!” he shouted, going after her.

  Angela stood over the dining table and its neat white tablecloth that looked freshly pressed for a dinner party, and her face seemed yellow, pallid. Her hands were raised to her mouth.

  The floor was littered with the remains of a host of broken clay figurines; detached torsos, heads, and limbs. In the mess, Myles saw a picture frame he recognized—that wonderful old photo of Gramma Marie and her husband—and although the frame was cracked, Myles rescued it from the mess. Angie kneeled down, clutching a colorful scarf from the floor while she pressed the clay dish from the attic to her breast. She sobbed, an awful, keening sound, as if a horrible blow had been struck against her. He heard defeat in her cry.

  “Angie, comeon. It’s an earthquake,” Myles said, the first outright lie he had told in many years. He knew, in fact, that this wasnot an earthquake, that earthquakes came in abrupt shudders with aftershocks. What was happening in this house felt more like dynamite blasts from somewhere deep underground. On a timer of some kind. Methodical.

  But even dynamite would not explain the water running from the walls and ceiling upstairs. Nor would it explain why there were so many leaves in the foyer where none had been when he and Angie went upstairs. Nor, in fact, would it explain thecrawling pile of leaves, nor the mud he’d seen shoot out of the bathroom. But the wordearthquake fit Myles’s tongue; it was something he understood, and it called for the same plan of action as whatever was really happening here, events he couldn’t quite grasp. The house might topple, he realized. The ground beneath it seemed to be shifting.

  And Angie was oblivious, mourning over trash on the dining room floor.

  “That’senough,” Myles said, and he hauled Angie onto his shoulder, a fireman’s carry. Maybe it was the adrenaline cascading into his system, but Angie was so light, he nearly lost his balance because he’d expected her to be heavier. She didn’t struggle the way he’d feared, and Myles thanked God for small blessings. Angie lay still while he carried her from her grand-mother’s house.

  Outside, on the porch, Myles looked in the yard for that deputy, Colin, who’d been posted at the front door when he arrived. He wasn’t in sight.

  “Shit,”he said. He’d known it wouldn’t be the same without Rob here.

  “Put me down, Myles,” Angie whispered, so he did. He was glad he didn’t hear the terrible keening sound in her voice anymore. He took her hand, and together they ran from the porch into the yard. The picture frame fell from where Myles had nestled it tightly against his armpit, but neither of them turned to retrieve it. At the top of the stone steps, Myles looked down at Toussaint Lane and saw the deputy’s rig still parked where he’d seen it last, near the mouth of the woods. Empty.

  “Colin!” he called, cupping his hands. No movement. No answer.

  Only now, outside of the house, did Myles allow himself to sink into the terror he’d felt from the time he’d seen those leaves upstairs twirl a minuet and that pile launch across the floor. Therewas a way to explain it—every extraordinary, impossible moment of it—but Myles didn’t know the explanation, couldn’t evenbegin to know right now, and not knowing had immobilized him. Fear bound him in place, digging his heels into the grassy soil at the edge of the ridge.

  “Look,” Angie said, pointing toward the ground.

  On the highest of the stone steps leading to Gramma Marie’s house from the road, there was a single muddy paw print in the center, identical to the ones that had crisscrossed his kitchen floor.

  “He’s here,” Angie said, voice hushed and fearful. “We have to go to The Spot.”

  The only plan Myles wanted to hear was one that involved getting into his car and driving like hell as far from here as they could go. But although Angela’s plan didn’t appeal to him, he was impressed that she had the presence of mind to come up with one. Myles, for the time being, had run out of plans. He stood motionless at the top of the ridge while he watched Angie flying, flying, running down the stone steps, running past the empty deputy’s rig.

  Running into the woods.

  Thirty

  IT WAS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLEto follow the barking. Maritza Lopez had been sure the dog was dead ahead, but now he sounded north of her. Maritza hadn’t planned to stray so far from her post on the backyard deck, but she’d gone so deep now that she’d lost sight of the Toussaint house on the ridge behind her. All because of the barking.

  She’d been standing on the deck when she first saw the wet footprints on the wood, and the barking began as soon as she saw them. It was a nobrainer. Rob said Tariq Hill had a small black poodle with him. The dog barking out there behind the house could be a poodle, a shih tzu, or a Chihuahua, any
one of the small breeds, but it seemed damned likely it was the right dog.

  It was also likely to be a trap. She and Colin knew that. And when they’d radioed Rob to tell him about the barking, his orders had been clear: Stay at your posts. Wait for backup.

  She wasn’t supposed to be out here wading through the Toussaint woods with her Glock drawn for the first time in her career. With three older brothers and her father to please, Maritza Lopez had been taking orders since she was five, so she understood the consequences of ignoring them. Especially from Rob. The homegrown deputy she’d replaced two years ago had been fired for breaking Rob’s rules, and far lesser rules thanMy deputies follow orders. She didn’t understand why she was out here chasing this dog.