She gasped at George’s skeletal face gazing up at her through the overgrowth.
Liv woke crying in the asylum attic. She touched her cheek, and then her damp pillow.
George was dead.
Chapter 15
Jesse
He’d been at the house for three days when he started to look at things. Not merely glance in passing, but really look. A newspaper lay folded in the master bedroom.
He opened it and studied the date in disbelief.
October 31, 1945 - nearly twenty years before.
Who saved a newspaper for such a long time?
Or - and this was the question that niggled at him - had the occupants not returned since that day? Had October 31st, 1945, been their final day in the house?
He glanced around the room. A bottle of perfume sat on a glass mirror at the vanity. A mint-green silk robe lay draped over a luggage rack.
If an illness had come for the family, surely there would be signs. Beds sunken and stained, trays scattered with medicine, wash rags in basins.
Jesse had seen the rooms of the dying. He’d sat vigil with Nell at her mother’s bedside when cancer stripped the flesh from her bones and left her hollow-eyed and impossibly frail. Pressed against her soiled sheets, she’d looked more like a stick-figure drawing than the flesh-and-blood woman whose laughter shook the floor of any room she stood in.
In the downstairs study, Jesse discovered a drawer containing the birth certificate of a child. Stephen James Kaiser, born on December 13, 1927. In another drawer he found a wedding certificate and a black-and-white photograph of a striking dark-haired woman in a long white gown. Her husband was tall with pale eyes and a half-smile as he gazed at his bride.
The more he searched; the more unnerved Jesse became.
Stock certificates, medical records, letters and photographs. Little by little, the study revealed the seemingly charmed life of the Kaiser family.
And every discovery posed the question: who left behind such things?
In the long, slim drawer in the center of the desk, his index finger jammed against something hard. He reached deeper and retrieved a small pistol. Behind the pistol, he felt a fat envelope.
The envelope contained a stack of twenty-dollar bills as thick as a deck of playing cards.
Jesse slid the envelope and gun back into the drawer, stood slowly, and walked out the front door. He sat on the top step of the house.
Paint peeled in curls off the porch. Vines crawled over the railing and onto the roof.
The Kaisers had left everything behind.
Gordon and Adele Kaiser, and their teenage son, Stephen, had simply vanished.
The money made Jesse uneasy.
Money, like all good things, seemed to invite bad luck. Anytime his father won a poker game or found a job with a decent wage, misfortune soon followed.
Jesse remembered the night his dad walked away from a game with fifty dollars, a veritable fortune for the father and son. They’d barely walked a block when two young men, one holding a pipe, jumped from behind a dumpster and demanded the cash.
Jesse’s dad, too drunk to know better, took a swing at one of the guys. The second guy cracked Jesse’s dad across the back with the pipe, snatched the money from his pocket, and both men disappeared. Jesse had been ten. He hadn’t tried to fight for his dad. He’d stood and cried, snot and tears pouring down his face, until he found enough sense to run for help. Later, Jesse’s dad would joke that they lost fifty bucks, but won two free nights at the Stick-em and Prick-em Motel with a pretty nurse named Mallory, who snagged extra puddings for Jesse.
Jesse learned not to trust money.
Nell poked fun at him for his superstitions. When she found a two-dollar bill on the sidewalk after they’d gone to see a picture show, he insisted she turn it into the ticket window. At first, she applauded his moral studiousness, but when he explained his fear that something bad would befall them, she’d only laughed and said, ‘Yeah, we could have gotten fat on French fries and cokes.’
The money, coupled with the abandoned house, only confirmed his fears.
Something terrible had befallen the Kaiser family, who once upon a time, appeared to have it all.
After a long walk, Jesse returned to the house and showered.
He would take enough money to travel south, rent a room, and start pretending to be alive again. The money made his stomach knot, but he wouldn’t take more than necessary.
So what if God punished him for his avarice? Let God’s wrath come; Jesse wanted nothing more than to give him a piece of his mind.
He cringed at his thoughts.
“Sorry, Nell,” he murmured. “But your God abandoned you, and I’m sick of prostrating myself before the bastard.”
He toweled off and started up the stairs to the third-floor bedroom, the young man’s room.
A rancid odor invaded his nostrils, and he flinched. It smelled like something dead and spoiled. Cupping a hand over his nose and mouth, Jesse hurried to the second floor.
An animal must have gotten into the house, maybe dragged a carcass in with it.
The smell seemed to come from the guest bedroom. He pushed the door in, and the odor overwhelmed him.
His eyes watered and he pulled the towel from his waist, stuffing it over his nose.
The room appeared empty, but Jesse looked beneath the bed anyway.
When the towel slipped down, Jesse sniffed.
The smell was gone.
He took a long inhalation through his nose, walking through the room and searching for the origin of the scent, but the room looked exactly as it had the day before when he’d napped on the bed.
He shook his head, puzzled, and returned to the hall to trek up to the third floor. As he stepped into the third-floor hall, the smell returned, worse than before, like something left to rot and decay in the hot sun.
Jesse gagged and turned for the bathroom. He plugged his nose and steadied his hand against the wall, willing his gag reflex down. When the desire to throw-up passed, he crept back toward the bedroom.
The animal was surely in there, and somehow the scent had seeped down into the room beneath it.
He kicked the door open with his naked foot, ready to hop back if an animal came barreling out.
The room was still and quiet. The only sound, the hinge creaking on the still-swinging door.
He stepped inside, eyes darting into the shadows.
He released his nose for an instant, recoiling at the overpowering stench.
It seemed to emanate from the closet, but the closet door was closed.
Jesse hurried to a window, wrenched back the curtains, and pulled the window up with a screech of protest.
He stuck his head through the open window and gulped the warm air.
Reluctantly, he ducked his head back inside, covering his nose and stepping to the closet.
He pulled the closet door open and waited.
Nothing scurried out. Nothing moved at all.
When Jesse released his nose again, the smell had vanished.
Chapter 16
Liv
“George taught me,” Liv explained, closing her eyes and reaching deep into the cool mud at the pond’s edge.
“Liv, who is George, really? I know you say he’s your uncle, but I get the feeling that’s not the whole truth,” Stephen said.
She continued to sink her hands into the mud, allowing her fingers to brush over stones and twigs.