The Duration (23 page)

We'd all worked at the Mount as kids before we got jobs at Tanglewood, and then, later, at the Red Lion Inn, parking cars for the garden tours on the thousand-degree summer days. Menial service jobs in which we tried to hide our scorn for the tourists and they tried to hide their scorn for us. Once, on a particularly humid afternoon, an ice-cream vendor drove in the main gates and wound his way down the dirt road to the concession stand, and forgot to latch his rear door after the delivery, so the door swung open on the way out and—would you believe it?—a box of Dove Bars fell through. Forty-eight of them, vanilla dipped in chocolate, retailing at the concession for four bucks a pop. A gift from God. Chickie found the box just outside the main gate, lying on the side of the road. We ate them all.

Showing Vishy Shetty (and her assistant) Edith Wharton's estate took about fifteen minutes, as it was only a mile down the road from Head-Connect and closed in the winter. The Mount was famous for its gardens and its ghosts, but the gardens lay fallow in March and the ghosts didn't answer doorbells, so after a few minutes stamping around in the cold, Jimmer pitched our guests an oral history of the county's haunting, complete with local color and beer, as a tool to assist Vishy Shetty's nascent character study. Vishy Shetty appeared reluctant until Jimmer also promised to let her check out his phone. The others leapt at the jailbreak, even though they'd been at Head-Connect less than twenty-four hours.

I poured a golden curl of beer into my tilted mug, letting an inch-high head form at the top of the glass and drift down the sides. The mug sat on the table, and I held it at arm's length, nestled between my fingers, debating. It was Saturday evening. I'd worked out twice, filled a small notebook with observations about Master Ueshiba's “way of unifying,” and washed my quinoa salad down with pomegranate-infused bubble tea. Ava Winston was giving a presentation on winter revenue streams in the back offices, and Tudd was texting me about a moonlight snowshoe class he thought I'd enjoy. But it seemed best to pace this transition, so when Jimmer asked me to skip out with them, I said sure.

Gable had plenty of ghost stories to choose from, dating back centuries, and every couple of years a new one seemed to pop up. Ginny Archey had already told the one about the glowing gravestone on October Mountain; the stone marked the burial site of an early Becket settler named Hand, a man shot for assaulting his neighbor's wife. The night he faced the squad was a muggy night. A vengeful crowd bayed in the square, while across town the neighbor's wife was in the sheriff's office recanting. Turns out they were lovers. As Hand stood blindfolded, a huge clap of thunder had split the sky, and rain started to fall in thick sheets. The crowd began to riot, and the sergeant at arms, having not heard from the sheriff, ordered five men with four bullets to fire. The muskets flashed like lightning, and Hand was no more. Now, on stormy summer nights, kids who went up there to park swore his headstone lit up like a lantern.

Between you and me, though, it was just headlights. The road through October Mountain dipped and curved, and at one spot near the burial grounds, your high beams could split two trees and light up a tablet 50 yards away. Especially if it was wet. Everything else was a tale passed down through generations of boys trying to get to second base.

It'd never worked, either.

There were other tales, newer ones, less utilitarian, like Kristin Sparrow swearing that water goblins wrapped their green fingers around her sister's ankles in the cold depths of Otis Pond, and Bud Park's claim that something unseen had pushed him to turn his shotgun on himself in his West Normanton tree blind three falls ago. Bud Park had lost his left ear and some of the sensation in his hands, and had stumbled out of the woods swearing that he wasn't suicidal.

“I think maybe those spirits came out of a bottle,” Ginny Archey had snorted at that one, echoing the consensus at the time that Park was ambushed not by anything supernatural but by the dovetailing influences of an impending divorce and Johnnie Walker Red. Still, it got added to the list.

Unsie had started to tell the one about the hard men of North Ford who drank themselves stupid every Thursday so that when they walked home they wouldn't see the ghosts of the kids who died in a factory fire in 1911, but he stopped himself. That wasn't a fun one. Which left the Beecher story. It had a lot going for it, a historical distance, some nice touches, a relatively respectable denouement, and our crowd was hanging on each word. When folks like Vishy Shetty start throwing their charisma at you, it's hard not to get caught up.

I wrapped my hand around my mug and brought the beer to my lips for a long swallow. Truth be told, I hated these stories. They were exhausting. But I told them anyway.

“You know how over by Ventfort, in the woods behind Fred Carter's place, by the old road, there's that big old foundation in the ground. That was the Beecher estate back in the 1910s or so.”

I had the table already. Even the Asian guys were listening.

“Well, so, Augustus Beecher is looking for a summer home for his family away from New York City. He has a young wife and a baby on the way and he's feeling pretty flush with money from his family's import-export business. So he starts building this big house up here in the woods. Place is a palace, marble floors, oak walls, lots of curtains and drapes. Two pianos. And they're just about finished in the spring of 1914, getting ready to spend the summer up here. Augustus's wife is from Montreal, and she's eight months pregnant, and she wants to get into the country and away from the city as soon as she can.”

I took another sip of my beer. Nobody else spoke.

“But then the war starts, the Beechers aren't positioned right. They start losing business. Augustus has expensive taste, MC Hammer taste, and likes to play the ponies. Pretty soon, he's in trouble. He starts looking for a quick score, and you know how that is.”

You know how that is.

It was windy and cold out and the sun was long behind the whistling hills.

“So he's looking for a quick score to get him out of the hole he's in, but he keeps making it worse and worse, and then he's in real long-term, poorhouse trouble. So he starts thinking about selling the house up here, but who's going to buy a big place out in the woods in that economy? Nobody, that's who. And Augustus knows it. So one day in the late spring, he tells his wife that he's going to come up to the country to see a guy about the horses—they have horses—and he rides up in his car. It's a rainy day, and it takes forever to get here, but Augustus is pretty desperate at this point. It's dark when he finally gets into town and drives up the old road to his house. The house is just about done, there's only some final shingling left to do on the stable, and Augustus stands in the driveway looking at the house and imagining the summers up here with his family. He doesn't go in—he can't bear it. But he takes a gasoline canister from his car and pours the gas around the house—along the porch, and the walls. He splashes some up onto the eaves. Then he stands back and tosses on a match. The house is insured and Augustus figures the insurance money will get him out of debt. Nobody but his wife knows where he is, and the house is at the end of a long driveway where nobody can see it. Augustus figures he can drive back to the city that night.”

I shifted, looking down at the beer. The Asian guys were leaning forward in their seats. Unsie put a hand to his brow. Jimmer was smiling—he knew what was coming.

“So old Augustus is standing there watching as the flames start to crawl up the sides of his house, and pretty soon the whole thing's burning pretty good—there was a lot of wood, and I guess the finishing stuff they used back then was sort of an accelerant—and Augustus looks up into the second floor window . . . and there's his wife.”

Vishy Shetty gasped. Her assistant gasped. The Asian guys looked at each other. Had they heard that right?

The minor movie star said, “Duuuude.”

I paused, poured more beer into my mug, picked up a handful of popcorn and tossed it back into the dish.

“There's his wife, trying to open the window, but it's locked and I guess with the smoke or the construction she couldn't get it open.”

Ginny Archey excused herself and went back to the bar.

“And she's pregnant,” Vishy Shetty said quietly.

“And she's pregnant, right,” I said.

The detail was a fixture of the story. You had to say it. But now it felt sort of obscene.

“Turns out she took the train up to surprise old Augustus, and with the weather and the roads, she got here ahead of him. She goes to their new house, sets up in the master bedroom and falls asleep. When she wakes up, the house is on fire. She looks out the window, and there's her husband standing in the driveway, looking up at her.”

“So Augustus, you know, he pretty much loses it there in the driveway, watching his wife at the window, and he runs into the burning house after her. But the ceiling collapses and the house burns to the ground and they never get out.”

Vishy Shetty's impossibly wide eyes got wider and I thought she might cry. But she also might have been acting.

I took a sip of my beer and continued.

“And then one night about fifteen years ago, Chief Winston—you know his mom was a Beecher—he's out walking his dog down the old road by that foundation, and the dog starts barking and tears off into the woods and Chief Winston gets real scared and he can't say why—he says it's just this heaviness, this feeling of
something
that he can't see, can't name, and then the moon shines through the trees and he sees someone standing on the old road just in front of him. He says he's scared like you wouldn't believe, and he just stands there, and the person doesn't move, and it's all dark and shadowy and Chief Winston swears he hears someone whispering to him, whispering right in his ear, words he can't understand. And, you know, because he's a cop, he says, ‘This is the police, who's there?' But then the moon goes behind a cloud and he can't see the person anymore.”

The minor movie star's beer mug slipped in his hand and sloshed onto the table. He barely noticed.

“And when the moon comes back out, there's nobody on the trail.”

I sat back, a little disgusted, a little triumphant. A sad task performed flawlessly.

“What were the words?” asked Vishy Shetty.

“You really want to know?” I asked.

The entire table nodded.

“
Il brule
,” I said. “That's French for
it burns
.”

There was a long silence. Then the lead Asian guy started to shake his head a little, and then the three of them got up and went to the men's room together. Vishy Shetty whispered something to her assistant, and the woman nodded and started pecking on a tablet.

Jimmer stood up and clapped.

“So good!” he said, heading to the bar. “Who wants another round?”

Vishy Shetty went with him. The minor movie star wiped at his spilled beer, which was dripping down onto his jeans. I looked over at Unsie, and he smiled sadly at me. All this death, all this fetish. I wished I could use it, could type it up, monetize it, rather than just carry it around for parties.

“How's Sara?” I asked.

He smiled, a real smile this time, turning a corner.

“Good. Big as a house. Don't tell her I said that. Cranky. But it's good.”

“You good?”

“Yeah, man,” he said. “I'm really good. Looking forward to”—exhale, shrug—“the baby. All of it.”

I grinned at him. He grinned back.

“I'm happy for you, man,” I said. “You think she'd have my baby?”

“Who?” Unsie said. “Sara?”

I nodded.

He wrinkled his nose.

“I can ask her.”

Jimmer came back to the table with his hands full of tequila.

“Who's up for a shot?” he asked. Vishy Shetty looked up from her assistant's tablet and started to raise her hand.

“I shouldn't,” she said. “But.”

Her assistant whispered at her. She lowered her hand.

“I won't.”

The minor movie star looked like he was at the top of a long flight of stairs.

“I'm gonna option that story,” he said, reaching for the tequila. Vishy Shetty gave her assistant a quick glance.

I shrugged. “That's an option.”

My phone buzzed in my pocket. I looked at it. Unsie looked at me.

“Chick,” I said, standing up. I downed Vishy Shetty's tequila and grabbed another one for the call.

Outside, I took a deep breath and lifted the phone to my ear.

“Guy,” I said.

He was amped.

“Guy!” he said. “What's going on?”

“Nothing. Up at the Heirloom, talking about you. You okay?”

“Yeah, sure. Bored. Gonna get out Monday, I think.”

“Hey, guess who's here?”

“Who's there?”

“Jimmer.”

“Jimmer? Holy shit! What's he doing here?”

“Came to see us,” I said. “And guess where he's staying?”

“Where?”

“Fleur-de-Lys.”

“No shit!”

I nodded, even though I was talking on the phone.

“Yep,” I said. “And I'm staying with him.”

Then I felt stupid for telling him. It just came out.

“Yeah?” he said, then paused. “So, can you sneak me in?”

I picked up the second shot and held it to my lips. It smelled like turpentine. The pool secretary at my office had a wooden sign on her desk that said “Be the Change You Want to See in the World.”

I knocked the shot back. It burned.

“Chick,” I said. “It's not there.”

And like that, the deceit was done.

“Huh?” he said.

“The safe is there, you were right. I got inside it. It's empty.”

Chick was silent on the other end. I forced myself to think about a future of stability, forward motion, employment.