An Unquiet Grave

CHAPTER 27

By 11:30 the next morning, Louis was standing at the front door of the DeFoe house. He had rung the bell seven times and gotten no response. There was a black Jag XJ6 in the circular drive and he could see one light on inside the house, so he was sure someone was home. Where the hell were the servants? A monster place like this had to have a whole army of them.

He gave up on the bell and started in on the massive lion’s-head door knocker. The sharp pounding sound it made on the heavy wood door echoed loudly in the portico.

No answer. But he was determined that the long drive to Grosse Pointe wasn’t going to be for nothing. He pounded again.

Finally, the heavy door swung open.

“All right! All right! Who the hell-” Rodney drew up short at the sight of Louis. “You. What do you want?”

“I need to talk to you.”

Rodney had a white apron tied around his waist, one of those big things that professional chefs wore. His top lip was swollen with a crusted scar from where Phillip had decked him.

“I tried talking once already,” Rodney said. “All it got me were two stitches inside my mouth. So, you here to take a swing at me, too?”

Louis shook his head. “I just need some answers.”

“About what?”

“Your sister.”

Rodney’s eyes were wary. “I already told you this is none of your business.”

“And I already told you I am not going to give up looking for her remains. Even if you do scare Phillip off with legal threats, you’re still going to have to deal with me.”

For a moment, Louis was sure Rodney was going to slam the door in his face. But then, Rodney just moved aside and nodded for him to come in. The heavy door closed behind them. The foyer was dark and drafty, not that much warmer than outside.

“Leave your coat there. No sense in you dripping all over the Oushak,” Rodney said, flipping a hand toward a worn Oriental.

Louis glanced around and finally left his wet coat on a spindly chair. Rodney had gone down the hall toward a lighted room in the back of the house and Louis followed. Down another short hall and he emerged into a brightly lit kitchen. It was warm and fragrant with cooking smells.

Rodney’s black velvet slippers made flapping sounds on the old black-and-white tile as he moved to the stove. He picked up a wooden spoon and began to stir something in a large copper pot. The kitchen was huge and, to Louis’s eye, oddly old-fashioned looking, with an old porcelain sink, glass-windowed pantries, and a mammoth butcher-block island in the middle. The island was strewn with vegetables and bowls of fish, oysters, clams, and shrimp. There was a bottle of red wine and a delicate bubble-shaped wineglass.

Rodney set the spoon down and came over to the island. He picked up the glass and took a drink. As the glass came down, his eyes met Louis’s.

“Do you like wine?” he asked.

Louis shrugged.

Rodney picked up the bottle. “This is a Pomerol. . sixty-six Vieux-Chateau-Certan. Would you like some?”

Louis noticed the bottle was almost empty. “You go ahead.”

Rodney smiled slightly. “Wise decision. It’s really too tannic and I brought it up out of the cellar much too early, I’m afraid.” He poured the rest of the wine into his glass, spilling some on the wood block. Louis noticed there was another empty wine bottle over by the sink.

Rodney took a healthy drink. “Excuse me, it’s time to add the tomatoes.” He picked up a cutting board of sliced tomatoes and slid them into the copper pot.

“I’m making cioppino,” he said, turning back to Louis. “It’s an Italian fisherman’s stew. Quite tasty. I got the recipe when I was living in Vernazza.”

“You don’t have someone to do that for you?” Louis asked.

“What, cook?” Rodney gave an odd grimace. “Mother fired the cook this week. She fired the maid, too. This has been. . an ongoing problem. She has always hated having strangers in the house.” Rodney went back to stirring. “Besides, I like to cook. It may be the only thing I really do well.”

Louis slid onto a stool at the island. Rodney was, he realized now, if not drunk, then already well on his way. But maybe that wasn’t all bad. When Rodney had shown up at Phillip’s house, he had been sober and that had given him an edgy, threatening aura. But this man. .

Louis had the feeling this was a man who became someone else when he drank, a man who could be manipulated to say things he didn’t want to say.

“It smells good,” Louis said.

Rodney pointed the wooden spoon at him, winked, and turned back to his stirring.

“Look, DeFoe,” Louis said, “I want to ask you a question.”

“And I will try my best to answer it. And please, if you are going to sit in my kitchen, I think you can call me Rodney.”

“You loved your sister a lot, didn’t you?” Louis said.

The spoon stopped for a moment; then Rodney resumed stirring. He didn’t answer.

“I didn’t think you did,” Louis went on. “But then I found this visitors’ log from Hidden Lake. Looks like you went to see your sister pretty regularly.”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah. Couple times a year but every spring for sure. April, in particular, regular as clockwork. Just like the groundhog.”

“February, dear boy. The rodent appears in February.”

“In fact it was so regular you even showed up after she was dead.”

Rodney turned to stare at him. “Excuse me?”

Louis pulled a paper from his coat pocket. “This is the visitors’ log. You went to see Claudia in April 1972.”

Rodney just stood there, the spoon dripping on the tiles. Louis leaned over and spread the paper open on the butcher-block surface. Rodney peered down at it. Louis poked at the line with Rodney’s name.

Rodney looked up at Louis. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like a glass of wine?”

Louis tapped the paper again.

Rodney let out a huge sigh. “I was in Europe when I heard. I was not. .” He paused, shaking his head. “My lifestyle had put me in the position of not having to face my problems. I had an infinite variety of pharmaceuticals at my disposal. And I tried them all.”

He set the spoon down and picked up his wineglass. “By the time I emerged from my stupor and came home, it was spring. It was time to go see her. And I did.”

“You went to the cemetery?” Louis asked.

Rodney nodded. “I looked at that little stone thing in the grass and I had the feeling that my sister had somehow slipped away while my back was turned.” He took another drink of wine. “I went in to the hospital. I don’t know, maybe I thought I could find out what happened to her. But it was too late.”

Louis picked up the visitors’ log, folded it, and put it in his pocket.

“Why didn’t you pick up her remains when Hidden Lake called about relocating her?” Louis asked.

Rodney turned back to his stew. “Are you a religious man?” he asked.

“What?”

“Are you religious?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Once, when I was in my thirties,” Rodney said, “I ended up in Goa, India, this beautiful place with beaches, palm trees, great hotels, discos. Everything a dissipated trust fund baby could want.”

He paused to shake in some pepper. “I met this woman there, an Indian woman. She tried to teach me about Hinduism, tried to get me to change my evil ways, I suppose. It worked, to a point. I stopped putting shit up my nose.”

Louis was trying to decide how far to let this wander when Rodney spoke again. “Now what does this have to do with my poor dead sister Claudia, you are asking yourself?”

“Yeah, in fact, I was.”

“Well, while I was busy burning out my sinuses, something happened in my brain. Some of the religious stuff just sort of. . stuck there.” Rodney gave him an odd smile. “When I finally dragged my sorry ass home, I began to study it. Now, all these years later, I guess you could call me a born-again Hindu.”

“I thought you were Catholic,” Louis said.

“Mother is Catholic. I gave it up for Lent.”

“You haven’t answered my question,” Louis said.

“I’m getting to it,” Rodney said, not turning around. “Well, the thing is, Hindus have a rather different take on death. They believe that the body is unimportant, that the soul lives on to inhabit a new body.”

“Reincarnation,” Louis said.

Rodney nodded. “They also believe that when a loved one dies, if you grieve too much or too long, the negative energy keeps the soul from making its transition.”

When Rodney turned back around, his watery eyes took a second or two to focus on Louis. “My sister’s soul is gone. Neither she nor I have any use for her body,” he said.

Louis stared hard at him for a long time. “You know something, Rodney?” he said, standing up. “That’s the biggest crock of shit I’ve heard in years.”

The barest smile came to Rodney’s lips. “Well, then, perhaps you’ll believe a simpler truth. Mother would not allow it. It’s that Catholic thing, you know.”

Rodney moved to pick up his wineglass but knocked it over. It fell to the tile floor, shattering. He shrugged and brushed the shards away with his velvet slipper. He swayed as he went to the cabinet and pulled down a new glass.

“Time for us to take a little trip to the cellar,” Rodney said, turning to Louis. “Come with me, why don’t you?”

Louis didn’t want to go, but he didn’t want Rodney falling down the steps. He followed him through a pantry and down a narrow stairway.

At the bottom, Louis paused. It was a large basement, with stone walls and a smooth concrete floor. It was dimly lit, very clean, and Louis could see the gargantuan bulk of an old furnace in the corner. There was one door in another corner, and Rodney led him to it.

Rodney held up a hand. “This is where I keep her,” he whispered.

“What?”

Rodney pulled open the door.

Louis felt a rush of cool air, and his eyes picked up the glint of something, but it was too dark to make anything out.

A light came on. Wine. . racks of bottles, floor to ceiling. Louis looked back. Rodney was standing at the doorway, his hand on a switch, a huge grin on his face.

“You should see your face,” Rodney said. “You were so hoping she was in there, like that detective in Psycho, you really thought you were going to find that I was hiding away some decaying corpse.”

Rodney was laughing as he moved past Louis into the wine cellar.

“Eeny, meeny, miney, mo, catch a Medoc by the toe,” Rodney said, his finger traveling across the nearest row and stopping. He slipped a dusty bottle off the shelves and produced a corkscrew from his pocket. Holding the bottle between his knees, Rodney uncorked it, brought the bottle up to his mouth, and took a long drink.

Louis turned away, his eyes wandering out over the basement. Even down here, he could feel it. There was a disquieting aura about every part of this ugly old house, like nothing was in balance.

“I hate this house.”

Louis turned. Rodney had come up behind him. He was leaning against the door of the wine cellar, gripping the bottle.

“It is a hateful house,” Rodney said thickly.

Louis moved aside and Rodney came out into the basement. He stood there, swaying slightly, his eyes coming back to Louis but not really focusing on him.

“This is where it happened,” he said, pointing at the concrete floor. “Right here. This is where my father shot himself.”

Slowly, Rodney raised the bottle and began to pour out the wine. It fell in a thin stream, splashing on the concrete and over Rodney’s slippers.

Rodney’s voice wavered when he spoke. “I was eleven when it happened, away at Cranbrook. The director took me out into the hall and said I had to go home. No one would tell me what happened. Finally, Mother told me my father had a heart attack. She was lying, of course. But I didn’t find out the truth until a week later when I heard the servants talking about having to clean up the mess in the basement.”

Rodney shook his head slowly. “He’s exiled, like Claudia. Buried in some cemetery way up near Port Huron instead of at St. Paul’s. To this day, Mother still insists he died of a heart attack.”

His eyes came up to Louis’s face. “I don’t have many memories of him, that’s the hard part. The vacation house in Saugatuck, he took Claudia and me there in the summer, and I remember skipping rocks on the lake and him playing a ukelele on the porch.”

Rodney sighed. “I suppose that’s a better memory than Claudia had.”

“Because she was so much younger?” Louis asked.

“No,” Rodney said. “Because she was the one who found him. Found him lying here, dead. She was only five.”

Louis looked back at the floor, watched the wine trickle into the drain.

“I believe that’s when it started,” Rodney said. “When she began to crack.”

Louis was quiet.

“Mother never took her to any doctors,” Rodney said. “Claudia grew up hearing Mother’s lies about the heart attack, but having another completely different memory of her own.”

“Let’s go back upstairs,” Louis said.

Rodney didn’t move. “I thought when she went to Hidden Lake, I thought maybe she would get the help she needed. I thought she would get better.” Rodney’s voice cracked, then dropped to a rasp. “Instead she got worse.”

Louis thought about what he knew about the hospital. What he had read in Claudia’s patient file about the drugs, treatments, and burns. A part of him thought Rodney should know about it, but it seemed cruel to tell him now. But what was more cruel? Letting him spend the rest of his life blaming himself, like Phillip?

“It’s not your fault,” Louis said.

“What do you mean?” Rodney said. “I turned my back on her. It’s all my fault.”

Louis pulled in a breath. “I need to tell you some other things, things that happened to her while she was in Hidden Lake.”

Rodney took an unsteady step back, then stopped, his gaze coming up to Louis in slow motion. Louis tried to read the look, hoping to see some strength in Rodney’s eyes.

“Tell me,” Rodney said.

“Let’s go back upstairs.”

“Tell me.”

Louis started with the treatments. Rodney stood perfectly still, arms at his side, listening. As Louis moved onto the rapes and the burns, Rodney’s face started to change, the twisted look of disgust hardened to horror. Then, suddenly, anger.

Rodney spun away, throwing the bottle. It crashed somewhere in the darkness. Louis reached for him, but Rodney threw off his hand, bolting toward the wine cellar. But then he spun back.

“Get out!” he shouted.

“Rodney.”

“Get the hell out of my house!” Rodney came to him, pointing to the stairs.

In the dim light, Louis could clearly see his face. Tears lined his cheeks. He was afraid to leave him like this.

“Get out. Get out now!” Rodney screamed.

Louis started to the stairs, then turned to look at Rodney. He had disappeared into the wine cellar. A second later, he came out carrying a bottle and the corkscrew. He walked to the center of the basement, then half fell to the floor. He sat there on the wet floor, then slowly began to wind the corkscrew down into the top of the bottle.

Louis watched him for a moment more, then went up the stairs.