The Piper

FIFTY-ONE




The rain had stopped, and the route to Valden was a flat stretch of interstate, an easy drive. It just didn’t feel easy.

Because it was inside Olivia now, locked down tight in her heart, the fatigue, the urge to give up, the acidic burrowing of despair. Tired. The word played constantly in her head. She envied Amelia, she envied Hugh, she envied her brother – anyone who was dead now, whose battle was over and done.

Olivia had always thought that the one thing a parent gave a child was unconditional love. Unconditional love of one’s children was easy after all. But now she saw there was one more thing required, and it was a hard thing. The stubbornness never to give up, the grit to keep hoping. She was beginning to think that getting older was all about wearing down. When she looked at people she had not seen for years, friends and family who had aged, what always struck her was not additional weight or wrinkles in the skin. What struck her was how tired they looked. Maybe age was nothing more than fatigue.

Valden, Tennessee, was more a pit stop than a city. There was a Dairy Queen and a worn down Citgo, but no cute town square or vintage houses. Most of the people there worked at a manufacturing plant fifteen miles away, line workers and managers engaged in the process of turning sawdust into the kind of pressed wood used to make crappy but affordable furniture, and all of them damned glad to have a job. She wondered how Bennington wound up in this godawful place. She wondered if maybe he was hiding. She could only imagine what Hugh would say about a town like this. Unless, of course, it was a place he wanted her to live. Even Hugh would have a hell of a time talking this place up.

Olivia double checked the scribble of directions she’d written on a scrap of complimentary hotel stationery. She watched for the split in the road and turned right, finding the stone marker announcing the entrance to WINDERMERE ESTATES. She did not know what she expected, but it wasn’t this. The houses looked newer and the trees smaller as she wound her way back.

Bennington’s house was a two story with beige aluminum siding and trim, shutters and front door painted robin’s egg blue. It was the shrubbery that reminded her of Patsy Ackerman’s bungalow – the neglected snarl of honeysuckle hedges, forsythia bushes and dogwood trees that formed a barrier to the street. A dirty white Ford Focus was at the end of the oil stained driveway, so Olivia parked by the curb.

The sidewalk was plastered with dead leaves that had fallen in the rain and dried to the walk like a second skin. A small limb was down from a struggling magnolia on the side of the house. It looked like it had been there a while.

Olivia started up the driveway, then stopped when a flutter of black caught her eye. She walked into the yard, the soil soggy and drenching her shoes. She found the feathers between two pear trees, a lot of them, mangled and smeared, as if the bird had died. She thought of Janet, pulling the fluff of a white feather from her pocket and putting it in Olivia’s hands, saying it was a sign from Chris. Olivia’s shoulders went tight, but she shook it off and headed back up the drive.

The sidewalk on the front stoop was cracked. A doormat said WIPE YOUR PAWS. Olivia rang the doorbell, trying to look into the windows but foiled by the tight seal of blinds. She rang again, and was checking her mobile for the time when she heard a scuffle of wood and the door swung wide.

‘Bennington here.’

The first thing Olivia noticed was the smile.

Bennington was fair, like Ack, his fine corn silk hair banded in a loose ponytail that hung an impressive way down his back, but two blondes could not have been less alike. Bennington was soft all over, sunny and lamblike to Ack’s black boots and angled cheeks and her lone wolf air of pain.

‘Olivia James.’

They did not shake hands.

‘Come on in.’ He opened the door with a certain reluctance, and Olivia stepped into the house. He herded her to a room to the right of a tiny foyer. ‘This is my little sanctuary. Sit anywhere you like.’

She only had a moment to see a bit of the house. The thin carpeted stairs that led to the bedrooms on the second floor. The way the hall ran straight back to what was surely the kitchen. And to the left, a living room, plaid nubby couch against the back wall, old boxy television on a stand in the corner next to a fireplace, and bookshelves jammed with paperbacks, the overflow stacked like piles of coins on the floor. It was quiet inside the house, except for the tick of the living room clock, everything economical, comfortable, and as normal as a pair of Wal-Mart jeans.

Bennington waited, smiling, for Olivia to go first, then closed the door behind them. Olivia wondered why he shut the door, if there was anyone else in the house.

The sanctuary had a layer of dust that rivaled her own office clutter. The entire back wall was a command post for computer geeks, screens, boxes, wires, a lot of it shoved aside and gathering dust. Olivia sat on the velveteen green futon pushed against the right wall, and Bennington pulled a little stool from behind a desk and faced her over a wagon wheel coffee table. The desk, the windowsill and the coffee table were littered with crystals, some pinkish, some clear, a lot of them blue. A feathered dream catcher hung in a corner of the room.

‘I’m so sorry about what happened to Chris,’ Bennington said, leaning back in his chair. He had a sleepy aura of contentment, as if his mind was on other things.

Olivia turned her cell phone off and held tight to the purse in her lap. ‘I don’t think my brother died peacefully in his sleep.’

Bennington nodded sadly, head cocked to one side. ‘Of course he didn’t. He died in agony. Strangling slowly, unable to move or call for help. I think it might have taken a while. My biggest fear is I’ll go the same way.’

‘So you know.’

Bennington actually laughed. ‘Sorry, it’s not funny, of course, but it’s either laugh or cry. But yes, I know. I know all about it, my dear.’

‘What are we going to do?’

He folded his arms and settled back in his chair. ‘Would you mind telling me your side? Your end of the story. Then we can go from there.’

Olivia nodded. She’d come for information, but she was perfectly willing to give to get. ‘It started with a phone call. From Chris. Nine weeks after he died.’

Bennington raised an eyebrow and scooted his chair closer. ‘Interesting. I had no idea. He actually called you. After.’

Olivia nodded.

‘What did he say?’

‘He . . . he seemed like he was reassuring me. Telling me that everything was going to be okay, because he’d paid the piper.’

‘He actually used that phrase? Paid the piper?’

‘Yes.’

‘Maybe he thought he’d paid the piper. My guess is the piper didn’t agree. That’s been my experience anyway. But go on. Then what happened?’

Olivia sat on the edge of the futon, and put her hands on her knees. Thinking she would just give him the highlights, there were private things to hold back. But once she got started it was hard to stop. It seemed essential that he know everything, so she purged it all, every last detail, the way the radio came on in the middle of the night, playing ‘Heart and Soul’, the way Amelia’s eyes had rolled back into her head, about her missing sister Emily and the death row convict who said he knew where she was. She told him things she had not even told McTavish. The blue chalk, the names in the ceiling, her original fears about things Teddy might have done, her relief when she found out Teddy was still the innocent daughter she’d always been, tangling with something that was over her head. Tangling with Duncan Lee. Decan Ludde.

Bennington’s head snapped back when she said the name.

‘Decan Ludde?’ he repeated.

‘Yes. He’s mentioned in the original accounts of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.’

‘You’ve done your research then. I’m impressed.’ Bennington put a finger to his chin. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

Olivia said she did to be polite.

She waited in the little office while Bennington disappeared into the back of the house, twining her fingers in the handle of her purse, listening for the comforting whistle of a tea kettle. Instead she heard the ding of a microwave oven, and a kitchen cabinet slam.

Olivia wasn’t good at waiting. She realized she’d been holding her breath when Bennington came in carrying two blue mugs that said Tennessee Bank & Trust.

‘It’s Oolong tea. I made it with lemon and just a bit of raw honey. I hope that’s okay.’

‘Perfect,’ Olivia said. She took the mug and poked her nose into the steam that rose from the surface, then set it down, untasted, on the coffee table next to a rock that had been split open to reveal the glitter of mica inside.

‘My turn then,’ Bennington said, settling back on the stool. He held the hot mug without a flinch, drank while the steam rose in his face. ‘We all had our reasons, you know, that night we went to the Waverly. It really was just a lark. Well, a haunted sanatorium, with a reputation for ghosts, and it was close to the hotel. How could we possibly resist? I had my dad’s car, the three of us had ridden up together. We were feeling the freedom. We were dead serious about our wrestling match, so we weren’t going to get wasted, and naturally it was lights out at nine, which worked for us, because we snuck out of the hotel at ten. We were way too keyed up to sleep.’ He looked away. ‘Hard to remember now how excited we were. Have you been there? To the Waverly?’

‘No,’ Olivia said. ‘I’ve looked at the website.’

‘Hell of a place.’

‘Patsy Ackerman says it’s like a watering hole in the jungle where the dark things come to feed.’

Bennington actually laughed, choking on his tea. ‘You’re in touch with Ack? Is she willing to help on this? Chris thought he was wearing her down, but then he died. She won’t return my calls.’

‘She’s preparing. Meditating.’

‘More like working up her nerve. Look, I don’t blame her. She had her own experiences there. And when I think back on that night – we were so young. Arrogant, stupid, taking on the world. You could almost say we got what we deserved. And like I said. We had our own private reasons, all three of us, why we had to get a scholarship. Jamison – escaping a smother mother who was going to keep him tied at home while he went to college unless he could pay his way. No dorm rooms or fraternities for him. And Chris, so worried about college money, your dad under so much pressure when his business took that dive.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You didn’t know?’

‘I was five years old that year.’

‘Right. Your parents were in deep then, money troubles. Chris wanted to work his way through, not ask them for tuition. And then there was me.’

‘Money troubles too?’

‘You could say that. It whispers to you, you know? Talks to you over your shoulder, offers you your fondest dream. And all you have to do is pay the piper when he comes to call.’

‘Like the Godfather.’

‘Exactly. And all hell breaks loose – literally – when you refuse. In my case, well, I had a girlfriend and she was pregnant, and her parents were pressuring her to abort. But we were in love. We wanted to be a family. And I knew that there would be no college for me with a baby on the way, no help from either set of parents, so I needed that full ride. Then I could have a crack at getting my computer science degree, and supporting a family properly. So yes, I wanted it bad, maybe worse than either Chris or Jamison.’

‘Then what happened?’

‘Oh, then. Then we got exactly what we wanted. Whatever you say about the piper, he holds up his end. He just expects you to do the same. And the price, for all of us, was unbearably high. Jamison had the accident, and wound up a vegetable living with his mother after all. Your sister Emily disappeared, and Chris was so eaten up with guilt he wouldn’t use the scholarship, he would hardly even come out of his room. It was touch and go whether he finished his senior year. And then there was me.’

Olivia waited. She’d told him everything. She wanted to know.

‘Me. Well, I got my scholarship and I used it, I went to school. And the wedding was planned, the parents actually coming round. We even had a name picked out, Allison, because Shelly just knew it was going to be a little girl. The pregnancy was perfectly healthy, perfectly great. Then Shelly went into early labor. Only she didn’t know it was labor, she thought it was just back pain, and by the time we got her to the hospital, things were pretty far gone. The baby was too far down in the birth canal for a C section, but in considerable distress. Cord around her neck. So, our little Allison. She strangled as she was born.’

‘Strangled,’ Olivia whispered.

Bennington looked away. ‘Strangled slowly, I have dreams about it. But. We lived. Chris, Jamison, me. We paid and paid hard, but then life went on. Until Chris stirred it all up last year, and the piper was on the hunt for all of us again. History repeats. But you could hardly blame him, your brother, with his daughter so sick.’

‘Janet.’

‘Pancreatic cancer. She was definitely going to die, she’d have been lucky to get another six weeks. So Chris made a deal and Janet was miraculously okay. All those test results strangely incorrect. Then Chris died, and he died hard, but as a parent . . . as a parent, I’d say the piper was pretty fair with him. There were two other children, the piper could have taken them all. That seemed to be worrying Chris for a while. But in the end, the piper was merciful, and only took Chris.’

‘And you? What did it want from you?’

‘Oh, I was a fool. My business went to hell with the economy. My wife got laid off from her teaching job. The house, the cars, the health care. We were losing it all. The Cobra insurance payments alone were double my wife’s unemployment payments. So all I asked for was work. And I got it. Caught up all the bills, and actually have a healthy savings account. But I haven’t paid the piper yet. I’m still waiting, to see what he wants. One thing you can say for him, he keeps his end of the bargain. I think he enjoys it. Making me worry. Making me wait.’

‘But what are you going to do?’

‘Well, what can I do? Patsy Ackerman is no magic bullet, no matter what your brother seemed to think. I’m waiting for my bill to come due.’

Olivia put her head in her lap because she did not want him to see her cry.

She heard the stool squeak when Bennington got up, felt the futon cushion sink as he sat close.

‘You have two choices, Olivia, I’m sorry to say. You can simply accept what the fates deal you. Teddy lives, Teddy dies, Teddy never comes home, just like your big sister Emily never did. Or you can make a deal. Teddy can come home safe. Maybe even Emily can come home safe. Maybe you can have them both. But if you do that—’ He put a hand on her shoulder, the slightest touch, then pulled it away. ‘If you do that you’ll have to pay. And you and I both know the price will be pretty high. The question is – is there a price too high for the safety of your little girl?’

Olivia looked up. Rubbed the tears out of her eyes. ‘And if I decide to do it. To make a deal. How do I make it happen? What do I do, just go to the house and wait?’

‘You could. But you say it never talked to you there. Maybe it can’t get to you at the house. Maybe you have strong defenses. Who the hell knows? If you really want to do this, you should go to the source. Go where it’s really strong.’

‘The Waverly?’ Olivia said.

Bennington nodded.

‘What would you do?’ Olivia asked.

‘For the life of my child? I have two daughters, Olivia. Two sweet baby girls. I would do anything to keep them safe. Anything at all. If it was me, I’d make the deal.’