Dark Debts (15 page)

“What do you mean?”

“I rewound it, and there's nothing on it,” he said. “Look, it's probably just—my mother was batshit crazy when she died. My father was not even human, and Tallen had to have been at least temporarily insane to do what he did, I don't care what the jury said. And if even Cam could lose it, there's no reason to think I'm somehow exempt.” He sighed. “I've been coming unglued lately. I've been having these migraines, one right after another. It keeps me disoriented. And these dreams . . . I can't even describe them. They're unreal. I mean, even for dreams. It's like . . .” He groped for a word.

“Like you're going somewhere in your sleep?”

His face tensed with disbelief and went ashen. “How do you know?” he asked in a tight whisper.

“Cam was having weird dreams, too. That's how he described them to someone.”

“That's exactly how it feels,” he said, still half-whispering. He put his coffee cup down and shoved it aside.

“Was there something your family referred to as ‘the thing'?” Randa asked. “That's what Ryland was saying. He said, ‘Tell him that the thing is real.' ”

Jack froze. He looked numb, like someone who had heard one too many bits of bad news.

“Are you okay?”

He stood up. “Let's get out of here.”

Before she could answer he was up, on his way to the door. Randa signaled the waitress for the check.

She found him outside, pacing in front of her car. Randa wondered what land mine she'd stepped on this time.

“Where are we going?” she asked, bracing herself for whatever came back at her.

“I don't know,” he said quietly. “I just . . . couldn't breathe in there.” He took a few steps away from the car, stopped, and stared down the road.

Randa had a sudden idea. “Could I see the house?” she asked. He looked back at her.

“The house?”

“Your family's house. Is it near here?”

He nodded. “About five miles down Thirty-Six.”

“I'd really love to see it,” she said. She was surprised by her brazenness, but none of this felt real anyway. She was sure that any minute she'd wake up, Cam and Nora would be announcing their engagement, and she'd be working on a story about where to find the best soft tacos in the San Fernando Valley.

“Well . . . okay,” Jack said. “I guess we could go there.”

Randa unlocked the car door quickly, before he changed his mind.

As was usually the case anywhere in Georgia, as soon as they left the town, they were in the boondocks. They rode in silence. Jack stared out the window, but Randa doubted he really saw anything.

The two-lane wound them through the gentle landscape. Rolling hills dotted with grazing cattle; miles of pastures bordered by tall Georgia pines and huge old oak trees. Randa had forgotten how beautiful it was, and how deceptively peaceful.

“What do you know about me?” Jack asked suddenly.

“Not much,” Randa said. She wondered why he was asking. He didn't say anything else.

“I know you've done time,” she said. “Cam told me.”

“I'm sure he did,” Jack said. He had no attitude that she could pinpoint.

“He didn't tell me what for.”

“Overdue library books,” Jack said without smiling. Randa glanced at him. She thought she could detect the tiniest trace of a smirk.

“What was it really?”

“Armed robbery.”

Randa was stumped for a response.

How interesting. I've never driven down a deserted country road with an armed robber before.

“Don't worry,” he said, breaking the silence. “I gave that up.” He pointed at something up ahead. “Turn left at those mailboxes.”

She turned. There were pastures on either side of the gravel road, enclosed in barbed-wire fencing. In the pasture on the right, a herd of white-faced Herefords were all lying down, feet tucked neatly under their bellies, watching the car with great indifference.

“Guy down the road owns the cows,” Jack offered. “He tends the fence, fertilizes and Bush Hogs the pasture, in return for running his cattle on the land.”

“This is your land? All of it?”

“It's not that much. Forty-five acres.”

“Where's the house?”

“Other side of those trees. It's about half a mile off the road.”

“How on earth did your father afford this?”

“He didn't. Ryland paid for it. My mother had this stupid theory that my father would settle down if they had their own home, so she talked Ryland into buying this place for us. It went cheap. No one around here wanted it.”

“Why not?”

“Family who lived here right before we bought it . . . guy went nuts one night and took an ax to his wife and three kids, then shot himself. Nobody was in a big mood to live here after that.”

“I'm surprised your mother would.”

“What my mother wanted more than anything else was a permanent address. I guess that won out over potential ghosts.”

“Did anything weird ever happen?”

“If I ever heard anything go bump in the night, it was generally my father slamming my mother's head against the wall.”

The road curved and suddenly the house was in sight.

There was nothing about it that offered any hint of its ugly past. It was the standard white clapboard story-and-a-half farmhouse with a front porch, the roof of which was supported by concrete and brick pillars. The place wasn't immaculate, but it wasn't in a state of disrepair, either. The only thing that would even verge on gothic was the fact that it was so isolated. It was impossible to see the road from the house, and empty fields stretched out beyond it on all sides. Will must have loved that—plenty of room to wreak havoc on Lucy and the kids, and no one within miles to hear anything and call the cops.

“Forgive the obvious question, but why don't you live here?” Randa asked, as they emerged from the car.

“Too many bad memories, I guess. As trite as that must sound.”

“Then why don't you sell it?”

“Partly because I don't want to deal with all that.”

“What's the other part?”

“I have this fantasy of striking a match to it.” He didn't smile when he said it. “Burn it to the ground, just sit here and watch.”

“So why haven't you?”

“I guess some other part of me needs proof that it all really happened.”

He nodded toward a small barn a few yards away. “I'm going to get something for the ducks.” He was gone, disappearing inside. Randa looked around, wondering what ducks he was talking about. He returned with a small red plastic bucket full of dried corn.

“You don't mind walking, do you?”

She shook her head and followed him. It was chilly, but the quiet was intoxicating, worth any discomfort. The sky was gray from the storm front that had not quite moved on, and it gave the place a touch of the ominous atmosphere it deserved. Jack led her up a hill, down a shallow valley, and up over a ridge, beyond which lay a small lake. The silence was broken by a frenzy of quacking from the half dozen mallards on the lake, who had seen them coming. Randa smiled. Ducks always seemed like cartoon animals to her. Cute, but surely not meant to be taken seriously. Jack reached into the bucket and tossed a handful of corn to the shoreline. The ducks waddled out of the water and all dove after the same kernel, not noticing that the ground was yellow-speckled all around them.

Randa watched Jack watching the ducks. No matter how he felt about the house, he and the land suited each other nicely. It was the first place she had seen him look as if he belonged. He seemed almost calm.

He tossed the ducks another handful of corn, then put the bucket down on the ground and sat beside it. She didn't know whether she was supposed to join him or not. She sat, careful not to get too close. He didn't even seem to notice.

“So are you going to tell me what ‘the thing' is?” she asked, as gently as possible.

He nodded slightly and stared at the ducks for a moment before speaking. When he did, his tone was matter-of-fact.

“My mother had this theory that there was a curse on our family,” he said.

“Was this theory based on anything?”

“A seventy-five-cent fortune-teller she saw at a county fair when she was nineteen years old.” He smiled, remembering.

“Do I get to hear the story?” Randa asked.

“Sure, why not? My parents had been married for about a year and they were still living somewhere down near Savannah, where my mother grew up. One night, while my father was out somewhere getting drunk, my mother and her best friend, Bird, decided to go to the fair that was in town. So they went, they rode rides, played bingo, all that stuff. Just as they were leaving, they saw this cheesy fortune-teller's tent, so they decided it would be fun to have their fortunes told. Bird had a brainstorm: she put on my mother's wedding ring. You know, to test the fortune-teller.”

He paused for breath, then continued. “So they go in and pay their buck and a half to this old woman, who was wearing what my mother described as a tacky gypsy outfit—as opposed to a classy gypsy outfit, I guess—and the old woman looks in her crystal ball for a few minutes, then she looks at Bird and she says, ‘Why are you wearing that ring? You're not married, and you're going to have a lot of trouble before you're ever married.' Now, Bird's kind of impressed with the ring thing, except that she's engaged and getting married in a month. She decides the old woman must have seen her take Mother's ring. Meanwhile, the old woman turns to my mother. She looks at her, she looks into her crystal ball, she looks back at my mother. Then she gets this look on her face like she's just seen a ghost, and she says to my mother, ‘You'll have to leave.' My mother says, ‘What are you talking about?' The old woman says, ‘When I see this, I don't go near it. That's my one rule.' My mother says, ‘When you see
what
?' But the old woman just keeps telling her to leave. Well, Mother's not about to leave now. Finally the old woman says, ‘You've taken on a debt you don't know about. You'll pay, your children will pay, a lot of people will pay, for a long time.' That's all she would say, and she wouldn't explain what it meant. She just kept saying, ‘I don't go near this,' and practically shoved my mother and Bird out of her tent.

“So my mother and Bird decided the old woman was a nutcase. Then, a couple of weeks later, Bird's fiancé got drunk and wrapped his car around a tree. Died instantly. Whereupon my mother decided the fortune-teller was the real McCoy, and there was a curse on our family. Everything that went wrong after that, she blamed on the curse. When we were kids, we believed it. Then we got older and started using it. Told her we had this strange compulsion to get into trouble. We tried hard to resist, but it was just bigger than we were.”

“Did she buy it?”

“Of course. It was a hell of a lot easier than believing she was raising a bunch of sociopaths.”

“Where did she think this curse came from?”

“That was the big question. She spent the rest of her life trying to figure it out. She imported mediums from five counties and held séances in our house regularly. They consulted Ouija boards, they threw tarot cards, you name it.”

“And?”

“Pick a theory. My personal favorite was that my father's father was a direct descendent of Genghis Khan and his spirit was haunting us. Mediums loved the fact that my father was a bastard, and not just metaphorically, because it left them wide open for the evil-ancestors stories.”

“What did your mother believe?”

“Whatever was the last story she'd been told. Although I think she liked the Genghis Khan one, too.”

“And that's the thing?”

He nodded. “We used to call it Mother's thing, or the curse thing. Then, eventually, just . . . the thing.”

“Then that's it. Ryland and Tallen are trying to tell you that there really is a curse.”

Jack shook his head. “My family was cursed, all right. It started when my mother married Will Landry, and there was nothing supernatural about it.”

“Then how do you explain me seeing Ryland?”

“He's still alive, he's turned on me for some reason, and the family is after Cam's money. They think if they scare the hell out of me, I'll stay away.”

“What about the phone call?”

“I imagined it. Or I dreamed it. Who knows? I'm being taken over by the family insanity.”

“So you'd rather believe you're losing your mind than entertain the notion of an afterlife?”

“An ‘afterlife' is not a pleasant concept to me. This one will have been enough, thank you.”

“But a good one, to make up for this one.”

He shook his head. “It just seems so stupid to me. The idea that if you survive this quagmire—not that you're going to
survive
it, because there's only one way out of here—but if you endure it, and stay reasonably good-humored about it, surprise, there's all sorts of meaning and order in store for you after you die. What kind of sense does that make?”

“Maybe it's too big to understand,” Randa offered.

“Maybe it's nonsense.”

Suddenly he stood up. He offered Randa his hand and pulled her to her feet.

“Come on,” he said. “I'll show you the house.”

Randa hadn't expected that, and wasn't sure that Jack had, either. He seemed to be trying to get out of the conversation more than anything. She followed him without speaking; she didn't want to say anything that would make him change his mind.

He unlocked the back door, pushed it open, and stood back.

“After you.”

Randa brushed past him, crossed the threshold, and stood in their house. The back door opened into the kitchen—an old farm kitchen with beadboard walls covered in yellow-white paint that was flaking in random and somehow sinister patterns. The appliances were all several decades old, and the floor was a hideous gray-and-maroon marbled linoleum, rippled by time and curled in the corners. Jack turned on a light, which she knew only from the sound of the switch; the room didn't get any brighter. There was nothing ghostly about the place. The eerie feeling had nothing to do with the threat of diaphanous apparitions or a sudden drop in room temperature. It was something much more insidious. Something blacker.