South Of Hell

Chapter Twenty-two

Louis had been sitting behind the Texaco station for two hours when he finally spotted the green Gremlin coming up Lethe Creek Road. Margi was driving, and Brandt was hunched down in the passenger seat. The car turned and headed north toward Hell.

Louis pushed the Bronco into drive and started toward the farm, one eye on the rearview mirror. He couldn’t count on having much time once he got in. But at least this time he knew what he was looking for.

Anything that made sense out of Amy’s memories.

This whole case had become too damn strange. So that morning, he had told Joe he was going back to the farm.

“What for?” she had asked.

“Some answers,” he said.

“To what?”

When he didn’t reply, Joe said, “You don’t even know the questions.”

The farmhouse came into view. Louis stopped, turned off the engine, and stared at the place through the muddy windshield. Oh, he had questions, all right. The same ones neither Joe nor Dr. Sher had any answers for.

Such as why Amy could sing in French when she didn’t even know where she was born. Or how she knew where to dig for those buried bones. And the question he still hadn’t told Joe about: Why had Amy put a lock of her hair into the locket he gave her, mimicking the one found in the barn?

All of the “memories” that had come out of Amy’s latest hypnosis session — the screaming horses, the men with torches, the names John and Amos — all of that he could easily chalk up to Amy’s vivid imagination fed on her reading of Gone with the Wind. Joe told him Amy had read the book so many times she could quote whole passages of it.

But the rest? There had to be logical explanations for all of it.

He went to the front door and tried the knob. Locked. Around at the kitchen, he found the same thing. Brandt had installed a new lock. He peered into the door’s window. A light was on inside. Brandt had somehow got the power back on. He paused, thought of trying the windows, then remembered something Amy had said.

Joe had asked her recently how she got into the Brandt house the first time. Amy had said there was a cellar door in the back, covered with weeds.

Louis tramped through the weeds to the back. It took a while, but he finally uncovered the two faded blue doors. No lock. He pulled one door open, peered down into the blackness, and went in. Clicking on a flashlight, he found the narrow stairs leading up to the house.

Once in the kitchen, he took stock of the situation. There was a Coleman cooler shoved into one corner. An old table was piled with canned goods, toilet paper, bags of potato chips, and Styrofoam take-out containers. Empty beer cans littered the floor. There was also a red smear on the linoleum. He knelt, running a finger through it.

Blood… and he had a fleeting angry image of Brandt hitting Margi in the barn.

Louis went quickly to the front of the house. He started with the boxes in the dining room. But they were filled only with old dishes and glasses. In the hallway, he found boxes of old clothing, boots and shoes, musty books, and one carton brimming with moldering magazines.

There were no boxes in the parlor. But he stopped at the door, staring at the piano.

Amy had been playing it that first day. He went to the piano, noticing for the first time that it was a player piano. He squinted to read the titles on the slender old roller boxes: RAMONA, MY BLUE HEAVEN, TILL WE MEET AGAIN, MAPLE LEAF RAG. He scanned the titles, but there was nothing of note.

Still, there was something about the piano that was tugging at him. He sat down on the stool and put his feet on the pedals. He began to pump them, and a tinny sound emerged. The piano was so out of tune, the thing so warped and damaged, that the notes barely sounded like music at all.

He stopped. The quiet quickly moved in. His eyes settled on the yellowed piano roll stretched in the window above the keyboard.

The words ran down in a narrow column to the right of the old paper’s perforations. He leaned forward to read them:

Caches dans

cet asile ou

Dieu nous

a conduits

unis par

le malheur

durant les

longues nuits

He rewound the roll, eased it from the piano’s rollers, and unfurled the top so the title was visible: “BERCEUSE,” DE L’OPERA “JOCELYN” PAR BENJAMIN GODARD.

Berceuse. That meant “cradle,” or maybe “lullaby.” It didn’t take much imagination to envision Jean Brandt sitting here playing this old roll and singing the words to her child. Hidden in this sanctuary where God has led us, united by suffering through the long nights we rest together, rocked to sleep beneath their cover we pray beneath the gazes of the trembling stars.

But how did Jean know French? And how did Amy retain it all these years? He didn’t care. This, at least, explained something.

He stuck the roll under his arm and left the parlor. More boxes in a second back room offered up nothing of use. He paused at the stairs leading to the second story, then went up. He didn’t have time to search every box, so he opened flaps, peered in, and closed them, working quickly through the two front bedrooms. At the bedroom in the back, he drew up short.

The pink wallpaper.

He hadn’t noticed the pattern before, but then there had been no reason to. Now, all the details registered: a large white plantation-style home, a white horse pulling a black carriage, tall-masted sailing ships. A couple — the man in a long black waistcoat and the woman with her hair up in bun and wearing a long yellow gown straight out of the mid-nineteenth century.

This had been Amy’s room. How many nights had she lain in here alone, staring at this wallpaper, absorbing its details?

Louis tore a piece of the peeling paper from the wall, folded it, and stuck it into his pocket. Back out in the narrow hallway, he paused. An open door caught his eye — another staircase.

The attic. He hadn’t bothered with it on his first visit. He climbed the creaking narrow stairway. The dim, low-ceilinged attic was crammed with junk: furniture, countless old boxes, stacks of picture frames, an old violin case, rusting tools, and, near the door, piles of yellowed newspapers, some reaching to his chest. He glanced at the top newspaper: HAUSFREUND UND POST, ANN ARBOR MICH. 1891.

There was so much junk — and so little light coming through the one small circular window — he could barely move. And the place gave off a foul feeling. It was nothing he could put a name to, but it was the same feeling he got being in the kitchen, like he had to get out and breathe fresh air. For a moment, he considered abandoning his search. But he knew if there was anything that could illuminate this house’s past, it would be found here.

He spotted an old rope hanging from the rafters. He went to it and fingered the frayed end, thinking of Amy’s memories of being tied up. But she always talked of being outside or in the barn.

He was about to give up when he spotted a large trunk. He opened it, but it appeared to be filled only with old clothes. Underneath the old lace and moth-eaten velvets, though, his hands closed around an old biscuit tin. It was filled with photographs, small, sepia-toned, and faded with age. There was no time to go through them now. He set the tin aside and dug further.

A Bible…

He pulled it out. It was a heavy old thing, its dark red leather scarred, its bindings eaten away by age and insects. He had seen one like it before, back in the Mississippi boarding house where he had briefly stayed while waiting for his mother to die. The woman who had rented him the room — Bessie, he could still see her face clearly — had brought the Bible out one night to show him her family tree because she had a notion that it would instill a sense of pride in his own roots. It hadn’t worked — that was a different life, and he had been a different, younger man then. But he had been intrigued by Bessie’s attachment to her past and her need to write it all down.

The Bible opened with a soft crack. And there it was, whole lives laid out on the frontispiece in a listing of births, deaths, and marriages.

Louis took the Bible over to the small window for more light. The names at the top said family record amos and phoebe brandt. Patting his jacket, he found his glasses and slipped them on. The listings began in 1800, and a quick calculation told him he was looking at Owen Brandt’s great-great-great-grandparents.

Family Record

Amos and Phoebe Brandt

Name

Place

Birth

Marriage

Death

Amos Brandt

Hell, Mich

1800

Phoebe Poole

1879

Phoebe Brandt

Hell, Mich

1802

Amos Brandt

1872

Ann Brandt

Hell, Mich

1829

Clay Stafford

1869

Lucinda Brandt

Hell, Mich

1830

Randolf Rawls

Zachary Stafford

Kalamazoo, Mich

1849

Linda Wigginton

Joseph Stafford

Kalamazoo, Mich

1853

Sharon Potts

Thomas Rawls

Kalamazoo, Mich

1853

Joanne Sinchuk

Caroline Rawls

Kalamazoo, Mich

1856

Jeremiah Healy

Quince Stafford

Flint, Mich

1868

Catherine Carper

This confirmed that the farm had been in the Brandt family for generations. And at least Louis had hard proof that the Amos of Amy’s memories was a real man and that his name had been written down in a Bible that Amy could have seen.

As Louis studied the names, he found himself trying to imagine what kind of man Amos Brandt had been. And even stranger, he was trying to imagine what Amos Brandt would feel seeing his farm in ruin and worse, knowing his family tree had produced such rotted stock as Owen.

He glanced at his watch. He had to get out of here before Brandt returned. He was about to close the Bible when a thought hit him.

He looked again at the names.

Damn. Amos and Phoebe had only two daughters, Ann and Lucinda. The daughters had married and taken their husbands’ names. So, how had the Brandt name survived five generations without sons? Who the hell had Owen Brandt descended from? Something wasn’t right.

There were two words scrawled under one of the death entries. The second word was cemetery; the other might have said brandt, but he couldn’t make it out.

He closed the Bible, took it and the tin of photographs, and climbed down out of the attic and went back to the kitchen. He retraced his steps through the cellar and closed the blue doors, pulling weeds over them.

Back in the Bronco, he tore a muddy, gravel-spewing path back to the Texaco station. No sign of the Gremlin, so he chanced a quick stop at the gas station, parking out of sight just in case.

Inside, a pimply-faced kid was tipped back in a chair behind the register reading a comic book. He looked up at Louis with eyes that said he didn’t get many black men in this part of his world.

“Hey, is there a cemetery around here?” Louis asked.

The kid frowned. “Well, there’s a big county one up near Pinckney.”

“No, I mean a small one, like just for one family.”

The kid shook his head. “Ain’t nothing buried around here.”

Louis thanked him and left. Back in the Bronco, as he waited for the heater to chase away the chill, he looked again at the Bible’s frontispiece.

Two things were gnawing at his brain. How had Owen Brandt come to inherit the farm and the Brandt name if Amos had no sons? And why had Amy screamed out Amos’s name in terror?

He stared at the name amos brandt at the top of the register. This was the man who would give him answers.

All he had to do was find him.