“Dark things?” Crystal touched the bannister leading up the narrow staircase.
“Oh, you know. What’s left behind. In murder houses, plague houses. They’re different. As if the house remembers.”
Crystal blinked at the rotted floorboards of the staircase. The lowest board seemed to move, pulsing up and down. Crystal blinked at Greta, the room behind her tilting and then steadying again.
“I don’t feel so well,” she murmured.
“That’s how I met him, you know?” Greta muttered. “The love of my life. He was living in an abandoned building in Detroit. He and two musician buddies, all three so doped up on heroin they barely lifted their heads when I walked in. I still have the pictures. A little leverage if I ever need it, which I haven’t because he’s been completely devoted to me for…” —Greta shrugged— “going on ten years.”
Crystal tried to follow her words. Doped up and leverage, but the room spun, a slow whirling like a carousel just starting up. The light bulbs would flash, and the ugly smiles of the painted horses would spin by.
Crystal put a hand to the bannister to steady herself. The knobby top broke off, and she fell to one knee. The impact hurt, but seemed to occur in a body further away from her own, as if she, Crystal, had stepped through a veil into another dimension. She could sense herself there in the old house, but her conscious mind was walking away, retreating.
Greta loomed in front of her. Her usually gray eyes were almost black, and her smile was hard and bitter.
“Until you came along. He was totally devoted to me until you.”
Crystal fell onto her hands and watched the floor fade to black.
35
1973
The Northern Michigan Asylum
Greta Claude
Greta held her father’s hand as he hunched forward in his chair, eyes clenched shut. Every few minutes he’d lift his head slightly. His eyes darted around and then bulged. He closed his eyes and commenced to rocking back and forth.
“It’s the man in the blue tuxedo,” he whispered. It’s him, he’s here.”
“Shh…” Greta murmured, though she knew all the doctors and patients had heard Joseph Claude ranting about the man in the blue tuxedo, the man he’d murdered six months before.
They didn’t know that part, of course.
They didn’t know the man’s body lay in the unmarked graveyard deep in the woods, on a hill overlooking the secret chamber. There had been a raised mound of dirt in the days after the burial, but over time Joseph and Greta stamped the earth down and spread out the soil. The rain and wind did the rest.
Days before, Greta had noticed flowers had popped up on the grave. Bright yellow dandelions.
A nurse paused behind Joseph. She rested a hand on his shoulder.
“Time for your medicine, Joseph,” the nurse told him kindly. “And how are you, Greta?” she asked.
Greta blinked at the woman, at her sunny, maddening smile and her stiff gray hair clinging to her head like a helmet.
“I’m fine,” Greta said, standing and walking from the room, Joseph’s mumbled words echoing behind her.
36
Now
Bette didn’t have to look in the phone book for the number of someone connected to Matt Kelly.
When Bette mentioned to the librarian that she wanted to speak to a family member of Matt Kelly, the woman pointed to a flier hanging from the large glass-covered bulletin board in the lobby of the library.
“The number on that flier is for Matt’s sister, Lisa.”
The librarian even offered to let Bette use the library telephone to call, a polite enough gesture, though Bette sensed the woman mostly wanted to eavesdrop on the call.
“Hello, Lisa speaking.”
“Lisa, my name’s Bette Childs. I’d like to speak to you about your brother, Matt.”
“Matt?” The woman’s voice dropped lower. “Are you a journalist?”
Lisa did not sound hostile. Instead, it was hope that tinged her voice.
“No, I’m not. My sister is missing, but I’d prefer not to explain over the phone.”
She felt the librarian stiffen behind her.
“Can we meet in person?”
“Okay, sure. Just come by my house.”
Lisa rattled off her address and Bette wrote it down.
Bette climbed the porch and knocked on the front door.
A petite woman with dark blond hair pulled into a ponytail answered the door. She was probably approaching thirty, though her size made her appear younger. She couldn’t have stood over five feet tall. She wore no make-up and a mismatched jogging suit with gray pants and a purple zip-up shirt.
“Bette?” the woman asked.
“Yes, hi. Thank you for meeting me.”
“I’m happy to do it. Come on in.” Lisa opened the door wide.
Bette stepped into a short hallway. Family photographs decorated the cornflower blue walls.
“Can I get you a cup of coffee?” she asked.
“No, thanks. I had some on my drive up,” Bette explained, following her into a tidy living room with couches and chairs striped in blue and white. A corner of the room held a small kids’ table scattered with crayons and coloring books.
Lisa sat on a couch and pulled a scruffy-looking stuffed bunny into her lap.
“It belongs to my daughter,” she explained.
Bette opted for a chair in a matching pattern.
“You said on the phone you had questions about Matt and Greta Claude. I’ve always wondered what became of her,” Lisa murmured. “A part of me hoped she’d met some untimely and painful end.”
Bette’s eyes widened, and Lisa laughed.
“That sounds cruel,” Lisa said, though she didn’t take the words back.
“Can you tell me why you’ve hoped for that?” Bette asked.
Lisa crossed her legs and lit a cigarette.
“Because Greta Claude murdered my brother.” Lisa didn’t blink as she said the words.
“She murdered him?” Bette breathed, remembering one of the several newspaper headlines: Boy’s Throat Slashed.
Lisa took a shaky breath. “Matt was my older brother. I just adored him. So did my younger brother, Gary. Matt was such a good person. I know everyone says that about their family, but in Matt’s case it was absolutely true. Matt used to bring home injured animals: birds, raccoons, an opossum once. My dad called him the bleeding heart.
”’Bring all the hurt animals home you want, just don’t vote Democrat’,” Lisa drawled in a deep, masculine voice.
Bette laughed.
“He probably would have voted Democrat,” Lisa murmured. “Shit, he could have voted for Scooby Doo for all I care. But he never made it to his eighteenth birthday.”
She tapped the ash of her cigarette into a lumpy clay dish painted in shades of purple and pink.
“My daughter made this.” The woman smiled. “She’s five and goes to this great pre-school. The owner has a kiln in her house, and once a month the kids get to make ashtrays or coffee mugs. It’s so sweet. Matt would have loved my little girl. I named her Matilda. If she’d been a boy, I would have named her Matt.”
“Lisa, what makes you think Greta killed Matt?”
Lisa looked out the window toward the wooden swing set in her backyard. A jumble of toys lay in the grass around the little play area.