South Of Hell

Chapter Seven

They were standing at the side of the gravel road. The light rain that had started around six that morning was still coming down.

“So you’re just going to leave me here?”

Louis turned to look back at Joe.

“You know you can’t come,” he said.

She pursed her lips. “I’ll wait in the car,” she said.

He heard the thud of the car door as he walked away but didn’t look back. At the padlocked gate he stopped at the trespassers will be shot sign. He thrust the flashlight into a back pocket and scaled the fence, landing in the wet grass on the other side.

He paused to glance back at Joe’s Bronco. He could see her watching him, and he knew she was pissed. As a cop, she couldn’t set foot on this property without a warrant. She knew that. Just as she knew that as a PI, he wasn’t subject to the same strict legal restraints.

He trudged through the high, wet weeds, a small nubby pit in his gut relishing the fact — for once — that she had a badge and he didn’t. Even as his head was telling him what a macho asshole he was for thinking that, even as his dick was telling him how much he had loved being inside her last night, even as his heart was telling him how much he loved her.

He climbed the three steps onto the sagging wood porch and looked back one more time to the car. Hell, she was just trying to help. He would make it up to her tonight with dinner and a good bottle of wine.

There was another padlock on the front door. This one was new. Something else new — a bright orange foreclosure sign — was pasted to the glass of the front door. Louis didn’t remember seeing it the first time he had been here with Shockey, and even out by the gate, the bright orange would have been noticeable.

Louis looked around for options. Some of the windows were boarded up, but a few were still exposed, the rippled old glass filmed with years of dirt.

He walked around the corner of the house, looking out over the land. The sheer size of the rolling land and the overgrown trees and weeds shielded the house from any neighbors. He couldn’t remember even seeing another house on the drive down the lonely and rutted Lethe Creek Road.

There was no sound except the caw of a crow. He spotted the huge black bird perched on the wheel of a rusting tractor. It was hunched down in its oily wet feathers, staring at him.

He jumped up onto the side porch. Three weathered planks were nailed over the door. He grabbed the edge of the top plank with both hands and pulled. With a loud crack, the board came off. A heavy fluttering sound. He turned. The bird was gone.

It took five minutes to work the other two boards off. He peered into the dusty window of the door. It looked like a kitchen beyond.

No lock on this door. He tried the knob, and it turned easily — too easily — but the door didn’t budge. He pressed a shoulder against it and gave a hard shove. The door creaked open.

He looked back at the road. The Bronco wasn’t visible from where he was. With a final glance around the grounds, he went into the house.

The smell. Not what a house should be but weirdly familiar. Then it hit him what it reminded him of: the basement of one of his foster homes in Detroit. Closed and fusty, with the powdery smell of old decaying newspapers.

He closed the door behind him and took in the small room. It was a kitchen, though most of what anyone normally would identify with a kitchen was gone. No appliances, just dusty outlines on the scuffed blue linoleum. Dark scarred wood paneling halfway up the walls, then faded yellow paper spotted with black mold. One wall of built-in cupboards in the same dark wood, the doors flung open to empty shelves. A dripping sound drew his eyes to a sink under the room’s single small window. The water had left a vivid streak of dark red rust in the grimy white sink.

He moved to the next room, stepping carefully over the piles of trash on the dull wood-plank floor.

An archway led to what he assumed had once been a dining room. It was filled with stacks of cardboard boxes. He could make out a round oak table in the middle with several slatted chairs. The table was heaped with more boxes. Each was sealed with packing tape and imprinted with the same letters: HANSEN BROS. AUCTIONS AND ESTATE SALES.

He started down a narrow hallway, clicking on the flashlight against the gloom. The beam picked up old pictures and carved frames propped against the blue-papered walls. More Hansen cartons. A broken ladderback chair.

The place was a warren of small rooms, each with a different wallpaper and different linoleum. Faded stripes, pastoral scenes, and flowers on the walls. Checkerboards, geometrics, and ugly patterns on the chipped and peeling floors.

He had come to the front of the house. Two large windows, draped with yellowed lace panels, let in the gloomy light. He clicked the flashlight off. The room — he guessed it was called a parlor at one time — was empty except for a dust-covered upright piano shoved in the corner. The top of the piano was stacked three feet high with long, thin boxes. He took one down, and the box crumpled in his fingers. It held a player piano roll, the paper as fragile as papyrus.

He set the roll back on the piano and left the parlor.

The flashlight led him back to the hallway. He shined the beam into two small closets. Empty. At the staircase, he paused, his fingers on the railing. It had been a beautiful thing once, this mahogany staircase, its posts intricately carved and beaded, its newel topped by a crown. It was the only thing in the whole house that still whispered of the grandeur this home must have had a century ago.

Dusting his hands, he started up. The stairs groaned under his weight. The rooms grew smaller, dingier, and more barren. He poked the flashlight into each of the three doors. More peeling wallpaper and wet, cracked ceilings. No furniture, no boxes. No signs of life.

He pushed open the last door. He thought it was just another closet, but then the flashlight beam picked up the dull white of a filthy claw-foot bathtub. No sink, no toilet. Nothing else in the room except a string hanging from an empty socket in the ceiling.

He closed the door. A tendril of cold air curled around his neck. He turned in a slow circle, looking for its source, and saw the small window at the end of the hall. The rippled old glass had a hole in it with a web of cracks, as if someone had thrown a rock through it.

He went to the window and looked down. There was a gray wood outhouse in the backyard. He let out a long, slow breath. That explained why there was no toilet in the bathroom.

Why had he come here? Even as he asked himself the question, he knew the answer. It was the way he had always worked. Going back to the homes of victims had always helped him. It never gave him anything tangible, anything he could even articulate. Just a vague feeling, like his senses were vibrating on a sharper frequency, like the life that had once pulsed in these places could reveal secrets.

He stared at the outhouse. This place, this time-warped, forgotten place. There was definitely a feeling here, an almost palpable feeling of despair, but it was laid over a brittle hardness that he couldn’t quite bring into focus. Something had tried to thrive here in spite of everything.

Jean Brandt’s face was in his head then. How could a woman like that survive in this soulless place? Maybe Shockey was wrong. Maybe she had just run off, just like her husband said.

Who could blame her?

He went downstairs. Back in the kitchen, he paused for one last look around. He spotted an axe leaning up against a cabinet and went to it. Its wood handle was scarred, its blade caked with dark red. He ran a finger over its dull edge.

There was no point in letting his imagination go crazy. Shockey had that cornered. He looked at the streak on his finger. Just some rust.

Outside, he stopped to make sure the door was pulled tight. He used a rusted hammer he found on the porch to pound the boards back into place. When he was satisfied that the door looked secure, he went out into the yard.

For a moment, he just stood there, surveying the outlying buildings. There were four that he could see, three shedlike structures and the looming gray-plank barn.

He walked a wide circle around the rusted hulk of a huge machine trapped in briars and went to the first building. A peer into the broken windows revealed what looked like a tool shed. The second building appeared to be a garage of sorts for machinery. The entrance was blocked by shoulder-high weeds and a pocked green tractor. The third small building held only sodden sacks of feed.

He remembered the outhouse and trudged through the weeds to it. The door was gone. He could see inside, see the piles of curled magazines stacked in the dark corner, see the dirty, crumpled papers on the bleached plank floor, see the warped board covering the seat.

He drew in a breath and then used the end of the flashlight to flip the board away. For a moment, he couldn’t move, couldn’t bring himself to act on what he was thinking. Then he stepped inside, clicked on the flashlight, and trained the beam down into the hole.

Dark brown sludge. Tips of old paper.

The smell finally made him fall back. He ran a hand over his face.

What did you expect to see, Kincaid? Fucking bones?

It was raining again. He lifted his chin upward and let it fall on his face. He looked back over the land.

The barn was the only thing left. He made his way toward it through the high weeds. It was a massive structure, two stories from what he could see, and built into a sloping hill with a gentle incline leading up to the huge main doors. He wondered again what he expected to find. A fragment of a dress or collar buried in the hay? Jean Brandt’s bones on clear display in a horse stall?

He went up the incline to the entrance. A heavy new chain and padlock secured the doors. He backtracked and went down, walking a circle around the barn. Deep in the weeds, he spied two missing boards toward the ground. A sharp pull on one yielded a hole large enough to wedge through, and he was inside.

He drew up short. He was on a ground floor of hard-packed dirt. The smell was sweet-sour with moldering, wet hay. The spare light streamed through the gaps in the boards of the high roof. The soaring space was quiet, like the world outside had fallen away. He had never been in a barn before. All of it made him suddenly feel like he had stumbled into an old, decrepit church.

The details began to register. Beams draped with age-hardened leather harnesses. Metal skeletons of machines whose functions he could only guess at. Bales of sodden hay spilling innards onto the wood floor. Dust motes dancing in the gray beams of light.

Louis felt a coldness touch his spine.

Something was wrong in this place. Worse than the house.

He continued his exploration, poking the flashlight into grain bins and stalls, shining the light into every crevice and cranny. There was an old wooden ladder leading up to a loft but neither the ladder nor the board above looked strong enough to support his weight.

Finally, he wiggled back out through the hole. The rain was coming down hard. Sticking the flashlight into his waistband, he hurried back to the front of the property. He could see the Bronco still waiting on the road. Joe had the engine running against the cold.

He was almost back to the house when something caught his eye. It was just a hint of red hidden in the weeds, but it was the red of old paint, not rust. It was almost covered by the garbage surrounding it, old coils of barbed wire, tin cans, and dead leaves. But Louis could see two small wheels and white lettering of some kind. He bent down and pushed aside the weeds.

It was a small wagon. The white letters on the side of it said red rider.

He pulled it out of the weeds. And the other letters on the rear of the wagon, hand-painted but still clear, jumped out at him: amy.