Son of Destruction

18




Dan


He picks up takeout at a drive-thru and parks near the Chaplin house, munching on Slim Jims while he processes his material. He has a lot to process, starting with this compulsion to break and enter. He’s fully equipped, waiting – no, praying – for Chaplin to go out so he can search the house. He has no idea what he expects to find. His mother was no stranger to this house, he’s sure, but he can’t start with Chaplin without proof, and this is bad.

He can’t start at all unless Chaplin goes out.

It’s been hours since he left the Archambault house, but weirdness filled up that stifling bedroom, weirdness drove him out of the house and followed him here, and the question is driving him nuts. What was that?

Where did it come from? Product of exhaustion or the heat, hallucination or what? Listen, it was nothing he did. All Dan was was there, laid wide open by her rage. Alone in that house, in the room where she died, he heard it! He heard her voice! My God, the woman’s been dead for thirty years, but all the hatred and humiliation of the night she burst into flames exploded, boiling inside his head.

He could hear her yowling, trapped and raging inside his skull like a frustrated ghost.

Unless I am f*cking nuts.

Eat. Get your shit together. Wait.

He’s too jittery to eat. It’s quiet in Pine Vista, nothing to see here, no signs of life in the Chaplin house, although the lights are on. The last commuters went by hours ago, heading home. He’s alone on this road, as far as he can tell. If someone else is out here in the dark somewhere, if there’s someone watching, Dan Carteret has no way of knowing. In fact, anybody could be parked out by the garden shed or behind the bank of oleanders that marks the property line and Dan wouldn’t know because he’s new to the territory. To him, Pine Vista is as bleak and strange as the face of Mars. And as still.

Waiting, he absorbs the night and silence in a neighborhood where nothing happens and nobody comes. After living on Ventura Boulevard where the traffic never sleeps, it’s like a soundproof headset. The silence is profound. Then a night bird cries and he jerks to attention. What was I thinking? Doh!

He slithers into the garage by a window on the far side, shielding his light. It picks up a dusty SUV, and in the space next to it, a patch of oil left by a second car. Chaplin’s been gone for hours. There’s nothing going on inside the house that he can see, but instinct tells him to wait.

He’s back in the car, gnawing his fajita wrap down to the paper when the front door opens. So he wasn’t, like, fantasizing about that blur in the tower window today, the pale face that came and went faster than you can say Mrs Rochester belongs to the woman coming out. So that was her he saw, flickering like a silent movie wraith. The man is put together like Bob Chaplin, tall and loose-jointed, but he’s so heavy that he shuffles. The two flick on the porch light and fuss over the keys in one of those practiced departure rituals, like pet owners patting the house and telling it be a good dog until they come back. Locking up against whatever comes.

Which will be Dan Carteret. With no evil intentions, exactly. He can’t be sure what his intentions are. If he’d known there were others living here, would he have come? Belching, he slouches behind the wheel, waiting for them to roll up the garage door and get the second car started, which takes a while, and back it out into the oyster-shell driveway and go.

Then he waits a little longer, to make sure.

What else does he have to do tonight, besides go back to his room at the Flordana and brood? He’s locked and loaded: flashlight and screwdriver from Ace Hardware in the messenger bag he’s wearing, in case. It’s big enough to conceal anything he decides to take. Another hour passes. Nothing moves. When he’s satisfied that there are no signs of life anywhere, he makes a cautious circuit of the house. He doesn’t know whether to be disturbed or grateful that these people are either timid or lazy. They left all the lights on.

Crunching through the bushes, he goes from window to window like a voyeur at a Times Square peep show. If he rocks forward and up on his toes, he can see in. For Dan, houses at night are like decorators’ display windows, advertising better ways to live. There are complete, happy lives available inside if he can just find the right place, and come up with the cash. Walking home from school in New London, he dawdled, lingering in spite of the cold. He stood around in the snow until his toes froze, waiting until people’s lights went on so he could look into those bright houses and will himself inside, happy Dan on his belly in front of their TV with brothers and sisters, snug in a tight family unit, waiting for suppertime. Night after night he prowled, stealing other people’s lives.

He does not yet know what he is here to steal.

His first glimpse of the lives inside this house is depressing. Through the front window he sees Victorian side chairs and threadbare brocade sofas, nineteen twenty-something to the day. Did Lucy sit here with Chaplin? Wait. Did they make out? More? The idea gives him the shudders. Next question. The mahogany table is thick with magazines and junk mail, neatly stacked according to size and type; he sees cut glass decanters and massed house plants and art that looks like something picked out by last-century maiden aunts. Somebody has lined up a six-pack’s worth of Heineken empties like soldiers on a side table by the recliner. Tropical fish hang in place in their lighted tank, fixing to float to the top, belly up. Except for the flat screen TV, the new century hasn’t made its way into the living room. These are not lives he wants to walk into.

He is here to steal. Given a choice, Dan would lurk in the bushes forever, but he doesn’t know how long he has. It’s time.

Even though there’s nobody around to see and nothing coming, Dan enters from the back. He pries the rusting screen off a back window overwhelmed by a thicket of Bougainvillea and forces it with the screwdriver. Planting his hands on the sill, he hoists himself up and inside, swift and neat as a swimmer clearing the pool.

Unlike the rest of the house, the original kitchen was redone, probably back when dinosaurs walked. Bleak under the fluorescent strip light, it’s bare and stark as a biology lab. The vinyl flooring has been mopped to death; the pattern on the green Formica counters has been scrubbed white. The room is so antiseptic that it’s hard to believe people eat here. It glistens like a place where food has been banned.

Sobered, Dan ducks into the shotgun hallway. In the windowless hall he can’t be seen from the street, probably because the architects were under orders to keep Herman Chaplin’s maids busy, but out of sight. Maids! It’s a straight shot from the kitchen to the heavy front door, with hall doors opening on pantry and dining room to his right, living room to the left. Golden oak bookcases line the hall, with dusty books shelved like prisoners behind dusty glass; this house hasn’t seen maids in years. The pattern in the Persian runner was worn to nothing before the present generation of Chaplins learned to walk and the place smells of mildew. Old, all these things are old.

He whirls, wondering. What is he looking for? It’s not like he’ll find his Lucy’s initials carved into the woodwork, or a hastily lettered sign pointing the way. There must be something left of his mother in this dismal house: letters, a snapshot of the two of them together. If he has to, he’ll hack into Chaplin’s hard drive and find her there. Entering the dining room, he drops to a crouch so he won’t be seen from the street. Not, he thinks, that there’s anybody out there, but still.

It’s been a long time since Chaplins sat down to family dinners here. He opens cabinets, looks in drawers, uncovering yellowed linens, mildewed table mats, tarnished silverware. The living room looks just the way he thought it would. Cluttered. Inhabited. Sad. Gnarled, hairy African violets crouch like spiders on ancient shelves in the round turret off the living room. The Naugahyde recliner dates from the Sixties, but like the art, all the other furniture looks as if it was nailed to the floor back in the day. Only the electronics are new.

Everything is in stasis.

Troubled, he stands quietly, listening. Trying to imagine his mother back when she was happy; why she was here. What she might have left behind. When you don’t know what you’re looking for, it takes you a while to figure out what you’re looking for and even longer to find it. If you ever do.

Upstairs, he stalls outside the third bedroom door. The two others are easy to identify: the brother’s is strewn with fat-guy clothes; hers is papered in violet, scented, with floral touches on everything that doesn’t move. It has to be this one. Matched leather boxes on the dresser, monogrammed. Everything neat. New laptop sitting open on the table, like an invitation. He should start with Chaplin’s dresser, then go in the closet and check out his jacket pockets, ransack the shelves, his desk drawers. His hard drive. Piece of cake, right?

Not so much.

Practiced reporters are trained to steal bits of people’s lives when they think the conversation is about something else, but they aren’t necessarily prepared to break into their subjects’ empty houses and ransack their things. A normal thief would do that, no problem. To his surprise, Dan is not that guy. It takes him too long to unlock his body, joint by joint, and move on.

He has to satisfy himself with a look into the family medicine chest: Xanax, Ambien, Zantac, laxatives, estrogen, everything but Viagra; this is a family with problems. Like the kitchen, their problems just make him sad. Sighing, he goes back downstairs.

Around now, if Dan is still thinking, he should be thinking that time is running out. It’s late. Chaplin has to come back sometime, and whether or not he does, the others will, probably soon. He needs to get done and get out before they walk in and find him here.

He should hurry; he can’t.

Instead he is stalled in the central hallway, revolving slowly, like an extra in Night of the Living Dead.

Um, he is thinking, if he’s thinking at all. Just, Um.

In fact, the only thing Lucy Carteret left in the house, the only vestige of her is here, hidden where he’ll never think to look, but Dan doesn’t know that. He’ll have to be satisfied with the useful item he will find, assuming he gets a grip. It’s in this hall.

If there’s someone else in the house with him right now, and if this stranger is marking time, willing him to give up and leave, Dan is too fried to know it. Disoriented, he rubs the glass front of a bookcase out of a pressing need to see his reflected face: first proof of the existence of Dan. He’s been standing between the bookcases for – how long? Stupid, but for the first time, he looks at the books behind the glass. Titles line the walls like people imprisoned here and forgotten. The history of Chaplin’s world.

Browsing the titles like a speed-reader, he finds the chapter he needs.

Decades’ worth of high school yearbooks fill the last bookcase, just outside the kitchen door. The logo is stamped in gold on the spine of every single fake leather binding: FJHS. The Fort Jude High School Swordfish, dozens of green padded covers faded in degrees, fill the golden oak shelves. The collection runs from the 1920s at the top to the late Seventies. Kneeling, Dan peers at the numerals on the books in the bottom row, chapter and verse on the last generation of Chaplins to grow up in this house.

The glass front rolls back easily. Greedily, he pulls them out, rummaging for his mother’s graduation year. Finds it. Plunges in, too preoccupied to know that he isn’t the only one looking for vestiges of Lucy here, or that the most important item pertaining to Lucy Carteret is not in this hall.

The object is in fact in Chaplin’s dresser, in the bedroom Dan was reluctant to invade. He might feel better if he knew that there is one item in this house that says it all, but it’s hidden so carefully that it’s stayed hidden for thirty years. He could have torn up Chaplin’s bedroom, rolled back the rug and emptied the closet and rifled his dresser, drawer by drawer without finding it, but he doesn’t know.

He doesn’t even know that a second intruder made his way inside while he was searching the upstairs, or that this nameless somebody is in the kitchen now, flat against the far side of the refrigerator, willing him to leave. Engrossed, he doesn’t know anything except that his mother was so ordinary in her freshman year, just another clueless, pretty girl.

Squatting, he skims the class pictures, looking for Lucy among the group shots of high school sophomores and juniors, working up to the senior yearbook. He finds Lucy at her best among the senior class portraits suitable for framing that kids can also order in wallet size: white T-shirt, silver hoops in her ears, Lucy smiling brighter than he knew. And, he thinks greedily, if he keeps looking he’ll identify the carousing personnel in that Jeep. All five.

Including him. Stare into their senior portraits until you know which one he is. Find your father. Then hunt him down. Shake the truth out of him.

He folds up on the floor with the yearbook open on his knees and studies it, rapt. Now, a yearbook is just a yearbook until somebody you know writes in it. Lucy has written in this one. This incriminating scrawl on the end papers: Love ya, Bobby. And thanks for that.

Dan is too intent on what he’s doing to understand that he is being watched more closely now, or to know that the stranger who kept pace with him as he closed on the Chaplin house, greedily assessing him by what little moonlight there was, the man who has been following for longer than he knows, is very close. Absorbed, he won’t be aware of exquisitely slow movement in the kitchen, as, like a sneak thief intent on stealing a closer look, his stalker fills the doorway at his back. Then the silence splits wide, torn open by a scream.

‘Ou . . . hou . . .’

Thumping.

‘Ouutttt!’

The intruder is gone before Dan whips his head around.

Outside the roar amplifies, half bellow, half subverbal screech, compounded by hammering – blind Furies pounding on steel drums.

Dan leaps to his feet. He shivers at the touch of a sudden breeze blowing in from the back of the house. The muffled roar amplifies. Then something happens and the roaring stops. He grabs the last yearbook and bolts.

Escaping, he runs through the kitchen and leapfrogs the porch rail without noting that the back door is thrown wide, as is the window he thought he secured behind him when he came in. Clearing the house, Dan spins like a dime, scanning his surroundings. He expects to see trembling bushes, moving shapes, some sign that something just happened here, but he quit the house too late to see anything that will make all this make sense.

There is nothing visible, nothing to hear, just a disturbance in the air, as though something tremendous just moved out.