Poe Read online

  When I say we, I mean Lisa and me.

  Lisa is the receptionist at Crosslands, one of four nursing homes that make up the Quadrant of Death. All four are located within the same city block, just a stone’s throw from the hospital, mortuary, and cemetery. Lisa is my main point of contact and supplier of scoops when it comes to the dead or nearly dead. She hears all the good gossip about the inmates (excuse me, residents)—things that of course can’t, but should, go in the obits.

  “Relatives?” I ask.

  “Bitchy niece who’s got her eye on Muriel’s Victorian,” says Lisa.

  Lisa’s voice is smoky, and I know she’s about my age, but I haven’t yet gotten the nerve to ask her to coffee and meet her in person. I like to tell myself that I’m working up to it.

  I tap my pencil on my desk. “So what’s the story?”

  “Well,” says Lisa, and I can hear her pause as she checks to see if there’s anyone within earshot, “apparently Muriel was loaded. She was a burlesque dancer in Vegas.”

  I drop my pencil on the floor with a clatter, causing Myrna to glare in my direction.

  “No shit,” I whisper.

  “But she really made her money playing poker. Word is she was a card counter, and when the Mafia found out, they got her a one-way ticket to New York and told her if they saw her again, no one would ever find the body.”

  I whistle through my teeth. Go Muriel.

  “So she just settled down and got married, never had kids, and played Suzie Homemaker until after her husband Harold died. Then she went back to Vegas one last time.”

  “No one would recognize her,” I say.

  “Exactly,” says Lisa. “Who’d suspect a nice little old lady with permed gray hair? I wouldn’t. Bitchy niece said she made over two hundred grand her first week, but the thick-necked guys started following her with walkie-talkies, so she decided it was time to clear out. A year later the Alzheimer’s started.”

  I jot notes as we talk. Not that any of this will make the paper. But still.

  “Anyone else close?” I ask. As in close to dying. I like to keep track so that if there’s a flurry of deaths in a short period of time, I can have some prep work done and easily make my deadline. I’m that sick.

  “Umm…” says Lisa. “Mrs. Jameson has been dying forever… She seems close, but then I think I said that last month.”

  “Two months ago,” I say. I already have a file on Mrs. Jameson with some preliminary research, so I could wrap her up fairly quickly. “Nothing new?”

  “No,” says Lisa with a sigh. “I found out she did some charity work at the hospital, nothing else.”

  I make a note to do some digging. There’s always “the thing” that separates a person out, makes them unique, different. It’s not always stories about Vegas gambling, although you might be surprised at the number of adulterous relationships, incarcerations, and illegitimate children of the Greatest Generation currently stationed at Crosslands. Sometimes the thing is as simple as a mastery of French cuisine, a collection of rare butterflies pinned on a piece of velvet in the living room, or a stay in the White House during the Nixon years. Finding the thing gives me a strange kind of thrill. It’s finding the story behind the façade, even if I have to spin it so that the raging alcoholic was “the life of the party” and the drug addict dies “suddenly of heart failure.” I know the truth. Someone knows the truth before they’re buried. I think everyone deserves that.

  “Dimitri, you there?” says Lisa.

  I have once again completely spaced out. This happens often in my line of work.

  “Hey Lisa, I wanted to ask you—”

  Suddenly the line is dead, and I see a large, familiar, thuggish index finger pressing the receiver’s button. Fuck. Nate.

  “Talking to your girlfriend on company time?”

  I look up to find Nate, Mac’s son and the senior editor, aka Senior Asshole, or Senior Douche Bag, or Senior Beneficiary of Nepotism, standing in front of me. There is a characteristic dumb smirk on his squarely-jawed face, and a gleam of unexpressed sadism in his eye. If there was a nuclear war and people resorted to a Lord of the Flies barbarism complete with cannibalism and rampant destruction of whatever civilization remained, it would not surprise me in the least to find Nate at the head of the ruling clan with a scavenged thigh bone in hand and automatic rifles strapped to his back, screeching through the ravaged streets in some kind of assemblage of truck, a la Mad Max. As it is, Nate’s proclivities toward violence are limited to editing my writing with bloody, indecipherable marks made with a red Sharpie.

  “She’s a source,” I say.

  Nate hugs himself and makes obnoxious kissing noises. “Just kidding, slugger,” he says, giving my other shoulder a punch, so now I’ll have a bruise to match the one Bob gave me.

  I try to hunch over my laptop, like I’m right on the verge of something truly incredibly important or at least more absorbing than starting a discussion. Nate, as usual, misses (or ignores) the cues. He settles on the corner of my desk, his balls frighteningly close to my stapler.

  His eyes furrow in some kind of bad caveman impression. “I don’t get it, Shakespeare. Why do you spend so much time on this crap?”

  “Crap? What crap?” I say.

  Nate pulls out a handful of crumpled and sweaty-looking obits from his back pocket. Nate likes to edit while he’s on the treadmill at the gym. He’s often said he does his best thinking while pumping iron. Seriously.

  I hate to admit it, but I’m a little jealous of his ability to work the phrase “pumping iron” into everyday conversation. I wish I could randomly drop lines like, “Yeah, I was in the middle of a triathlon,” but I have a long-standing aversion to any activity that involves pain and an increased heart rate.

  “This crap,” says Nate, pushing a pile of my writing at me. “Do you know how long it takes me to edit this shit?” Nate pulls a sheet out and squints at it. “He died of an unidentified prosodemic illness. Who talks like this? Every other sentence I have to use a dictionary.”

  I take one of the pages and try to flatten it back out.

  “It’s like a fucking never-ending game of Scrabble. And I hate Scrabble.” Nate picks up my pencil and starts scratching the back of his ear with it.

  “Maybe you should rethink your vocation,” I mutter.

  “There!” says Nate, pointing my pencil back at me. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. What the hell is a vocation?”

  “It’s a kind of candle,” I say without hesitation. I have no mercy.

  “Oh yeah,” says Nate. “Those little ones… Anyway, we can’t print all this shit. No one cares. It’s just dead old people.”

  I swallow everything I’d like to say. Hard. “So what would you like me to change?”

  “Just take out some words. The big ones.”

  I look at the pile in front of me. “So you want me to just take out some words.”

  Nate’s face brightens measurably. “Now you get it.” He does an excited drum roll on my desk. “Just get it down to the designer before deadline. We cool?”

  I have no intention of editing a word. “We cool,” I say.

  My parents’ obituary was sparse—they got one paragraph combined, as if their dying together had somehow melded their lives into a single conglomeration, punctuated by my father’s country of origin (Russia) and a vague allusion to my mother’s interest in baking. An ad for Dalton Discount Motors pushed hard into their column: 0% DOWN, NO PAYMENTS FOR SIX MONTHS, DRIVE AWAY HAPPY. I don’t know who gave the details to the writer at their local paper—I was a little blown out at the time—and the whole experience had the feel of a bad hallucinogenic trip. Not that I have a lot of experience with that kind of thing, but before I failed college last year I did a little experimenting.

  In fact, the night my parents died I’d been to a disastrous Halloween party at a frat house. There was this hot girl from my English Lit class with long, wavy hair who’d decided the best costume was
none at all. She gave me a hallucinogenic pill called a disco biscuit, along with a shot of warm vodka to chase it down with. I was completely disguised as a Wookie, and she’d obviously mistaken me for one of the frat brothers—a mistake I was more than happy to play along with—so I downed it all in one gulp. What happened next is a blur. There were blobby colors that seemed to wish me ill, threatening blues and purples, and if I stared at anything long enough, the edges started to bleed, as if the pulsating boundaries of reality had become loose, unstrung. My tongue got thick and everything I said came out garbled. I thought I said “I think I’m going to puke,” and instead I actually said “Russia has a nuke”—truly unfortunate, because the girl laughed instead of running to get me a bowl to be sick in, and when I removed my mask to clumsily kiss her neck, I lost my lunch instead. I still don’t know how I got home.

  And then when I got the call at four in the morning from Aunt Lucy—not literally my aunt; more like my mother’s best friend—and she said my parents had died in a car accident, time took on this quality that’s hard to explain. It was as if time became thick, like water—not that it slowed down, but everything got all liquid, including my knees before I dropped to the floor. I could hear Lucy’s concerned voice through the end of the receiver, all tinny sounding and distant: “Dimitri, are you okay? Dimitri? Dimitri?” And I guess I’d have been worried too, because it wasn’t like I lived in a dorm surrounded by actual people; by then I called an isolated trailer on the outskirts of town home. I wanted to have a first draft of my novel done by the time I graduated, which was not going to happen in a dorm where every Friday night reggae, punk, and metal competed to see which overblown bass line could shatter the windows first. That, and the fact that every time I hit the head there were pails of vomit. (The pails provided by janitors who were tired of unplugging the sinks from undigested chunks of Chickwiches.)

  After the call I didn’t really eat or sleep for a couple of weeks. Lucy and some relatives I’d never heard of—ancient cousins with papery, white skin—made all the arrangements, and a funeral, I found out, is like a wedding in reverse, with less time to plan. Once the bodies were identified—eternal thanks to Lucy for taking that on; the car wreck, I understand, beheaded my mother—there were flowers to be ordered, coffins to be chosen, the mortuary and catering company to be coordinated with. I remember soggy meatballs, bread that tasted like paper, all with the strange ticking of the bodies’ inevitable decay pressing over the proceedings. There is a rush to see it done, over. I wore a black rayon suit—itchy and thin—at my parents’ gravesite. I held a bit of dirt, which in retrospect must have been some kind of gardening mulch, because the ground was rock-solid frozen. Words were said, coffins were lowered, and I tossed the dirt into the neat rectangular plots, wiping my hands on my pants after.

  The next day, with a bad, pressing feeling in my intestines from the aforementioned meatballs, I had a meeting with the executor, a reedy, thin man with very thin hair. In his cramped, dim office, he explained that there was a will, but also X amount of debt, which meant that the estate would still be in the hole after everything was liquidated—that word again, “liquidated.” He said I should go and pick out a few things that I wanted to keep. It was hard to understand—the words themselves seemed to move so slowly that I could almost see them hang in the air, and I found myself inordinately distracted by a patch of tape holding together a tear in the leather seat. There were papers to sign—scratch of pen on paper—and my hand was gripped in a meaningful way.

  I spent the next few days sorting through the house and putting things in five oversized cardboard boxes.

  My mother, I discovered, was surprisingly sentimental. The attic rafters were crammed with every Mother’s Day card I had ever made with crayon, Christmas ornaments, my red tricycle, battered from several ill-planned trips into the gulch behind our house, along with the odd antique, like a moth-eaten bowler hat and a croquet set that looked well used, although we’d never played. Eventually I started to rush through the debris like I was on one of those crazy shopping game shows, pulling out photos by the handful and tossing them in the boxes without looking, making split decisions. Baby teeth? No. Kindergarten macaroni necklace Mother’s Day present? What the hell, sure.

  My father, on the other hand, kept surprisingly little.

  Contents of my father’s closet: ten identical short-sleeved polo shirts in muted colors and six pairs of wool slacks (black and gray). Contents of drawer (he had one, and only one, in the mahogany dresser): six pairs of boxers and six white T-shirts, folded with military precision. In a shoebox under the dresser I found a tarnished silver ring and a broken pocket watch. The ring was engraved with some kind of Celtic knot, and there was a dull red stone in its center. He’d always worn the ring on his right hand, a mirror of the plain gold wedding ring he wore on his left. It was oddly missing from the baggy the funeral director gave me after the wake, jewelry taken from their cold bodies and presented like some kind of corporeal parting gift. I thought he’d nipped it and even sent a few heated texts that were never replied to. So, on rediscovering the ring, I decided to do the smart thing and slip it into the zipped pocket of my messenger bag, which I keep on me at almost all times. I put the shoebox in one of my large cardboard boxes, leaving the rest for the executor to donate. Of course when I went to look for the ring later, it wasn’t there, and I never did find it again—something that haunts me in a recurring dream where I look down and see it on my finger, only to watch it slowly disappear.

  The boxes are currently sitting in my apartment closet, taped shut. I haven’t opened them in a year, and in fact I don’t even use that closet. I find that the floor works perfectly well for coat storage and umbrellas.

  Two weeks. Everything you love, own, and cherish, can be gone, liquidated, and lost forever in two weeks. Give or take a day.

  By the time four o’clock hits I’m wondering if it’d be worth it to pull the fire alarm and get an extra hour of my life back, when suddenly Bob, uncharacteristically ashen-faced and sweaty, roughly pulls on his jacket and bolts out the door.

  Myrna inadvertently catches my eye.

  “What’s up with him?”

  She icily swivels her chair out of my sight line.

  My phone buzzes. I hope whoever died is someone I have a file on, because there’s no way I’m staying past five.

  But it’s just Mac. “Kid, you still here?”

  Mac likes to call me “kid,” which makes me wonder if I could sue him for age discrimination. For a moment I consider gently placing the phone back on the receiver and ducking out the back through the fire exit, but then I remember my rent is due.

  “Sure I’m here,” I say in a busy, curt voice, tapping loudly on my laptop. “Got a lot on my plate. What’s up?”

  “Bob’s gotta go to the hospital for a colonoscopy, for Christ’s sake. Afraid he’s got polyps in his ass.”

  This brings up the single most disturbing visual image of my life. I rub my forehead. “That really sucks.”

  “You bet it sucks, ’cause it’s Halloween and I already paid Maddy sixty bucks to do her psychic voodoo thing at the Aspinwall place. Huge fuckin’ feature in the Saturday paper, and Bob’s freaking out, ’cause he’s got blood in his shit.”

  Second most disturbing visual image of my life.

  “So, guess what? Today is your lucky fuckin’ day. I’m gonna put your two-week notice on ice and let you write the feature. How do you like that shit? I mean, no offense to Bob and his polyps, but I gotta have something to print or all the fuckin’ advertisers will pull out, and it’s not like we can fill up those pages with obits unless there’s, like, some kind of fuckin’ bus accident or something. We should be so lucky, right?”

  “So this feature—”

  “Yeah, you need to get your ass down to the Aspinwall mansion by seven, otherwise Maddy will pitch a fit. She’s my fuckin’ wife’s hairdresser, and damn, she’s got a mouth on her. I’m sending Nate, too, ’cause he’
s driving me up the fuckin’ wall. He wants to start a gym-and-donut franchise. Can you believe that shit?”

  I have nothing to say about that.

  “I swear to God my wife fucked around behind my back, ’cause that idiot doesn’t even look like me. But what the hell can I do, right?”

  I try to get the conversation back on track. “So what’s the angle?”

  “Angle? It’s a fuckin’ Halloween story in a fuckin’ haunted house. You sure you went to college, ’cause you’re starting to sound a lot like Nate.”

  “Right,” I say, trying to think if I’ve ever heard of Aspinwall mansion. I haven’t. “So—”

  “Just don’t fuck it up, because I swear to fuckin’ God this is your last shot.”

  Click.

  Great. Me, Nate, and a psychic hairdresser spending the first anniversary of my parents’ death in some kind of decrepit mansion that’s probably a death trap and will certainly set off my mold allergies.

  My life could not possibly get worse.

  CHAPTER TWO: SPOOKY

  I’m twenty minutes late, because the address of the “haunted” mansion isn’t on Google Maps, and I drive right by it two or three times. The entrance is completely overgrown with thorny, hostile-looking bushes. In my messenger bag I’ve got a notepad, pencil, and thermos full of coffee made with eBoost caffeinated water, my special concoction that would be illegal if anyone paid attention and will probably cause my heart to beat erratically. But after the séance or whatever, I still have to get the copy in by midnight, so it’s a price I’m willing to pay.

  I look to see if there are any other cars parked on the street—nope—which means that even though I’m late, I’m also the first to arrive. That’s assuming Nate will be able to find his way here, which I doubt, given his seventh-grade reading level and presumably poor map skills. I should be so lucky. But then I’d be clueless myself how to find Aspinwall if I hadn’t called Lisa—font of wisdom that she is—because there wasn’t anything on the Internet except for a few digital pictures taken by drunk teenagers who apparently have made it their party destination.