Poe Read online

  Lisa told me that Delia Aspinwall was admitted to Crosslands two years ago. She was the daughter of Captain Aspinwall, who built the mansion after he made his fortune with evil South American coffee plantations that doubly exploited the indigenous tribes: first by forcing them to cut down the rain forest, their main source of sustenance, and then by making them pick coffee beans on the cleared land so their families wouldn’t starve to death. Now seventy-eight, Delia is only semilucid, but she is remarkably bossy and sharp tongued, so none of the nurses want anything to do with her. Her habit of saving feces to throw at staff hasn’t helped her popularity much either.

  Delia lived at Aspinwall until she was eight, when there was a tragic fire of undetermined origin that claimed the lives of six rich socialites, including her mother. Some said her father started the fire (harsher tongues whispered it was Delia herself), and from age eight to nine Delia didn’t speak a word, which made her “queer” (not the kind that immediately comes to mind). Finally at age ten she broke her silence, demanding to go back to Aspinwall, because she said her mother wasn’t really dead; she had seen her at the movie theater watching Animal Crackers with the gardener. At this point her father sent her off to an English boarding school until she was eighteen and ready to be married to a respectable oil tycoon ten years her senior.

  Captain Aspinwall apparently didn’t have enough cash to fix the mansion, a dictatorship in Guatemala having put a dent in the family business. Delia, rich and unforgiving, was unwilling to lend the money. So there the house sat, home to mice and climbing ivy, until her father finally passed away in the seventies from a well-deserved bout of liver cancer. (What was left of his wealth had been blown on expensive Scotch whisky.) Delia unloaded the mansion for the first lowball offer she got, from a couple of hippies fresh from Amherst College who wanted to start a New England commune.

  But—and here comes tragic death number seven—at Aspinwall the hippy dude was apparently killed by an animal, possibly a bear but more likely a rabid dog, and that was the end of that. There was talk of razing the building to the ground, but although it was officially condemned, there wasn’t enough tax revenue for the demolition, so Aspinwall stood. Of course, with a tragic fire and grisly deaths, ghost stories ran rampant, and many of the aforementioned drunk teenagers claim to have heard footsteps, been attacked by an invisible entity, and seen lights flicker, even though electricity hasn’t run to the place since Carter was president. The horror, however, apparently isn’t enough to put an end to the midnight bashes.

  Suddenly I hear a car slowly making its way down the street. It’s a battered Ford Escort that was probably white at one point in the distant past and has a right front tire that’s going flat. Maddy.

  But no, the person who gets out of the car is definitely not a sixty-year-old psychic. She’s young—my age, maybe younger—with long auburn hair, ultra-short bangs, green Lennon glasses, and ripped jeans. She wears a bright red wool hat, navy-blue scarf, and actual mittens.

  “Hey! You must be Dimitri,” she says, and I immediately recognize her smoky voice. Shit, she’s better looking than I imagined.

  “Lisa?”

  She smiles and walks forward, holding out a mittened hand. I take it. “Nice to finally meet you in person,” she says.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask and then immediately wish I hadn’t, because damn, what do I care?

  “I’m crashing your spooky party,” she says. “Plus I forgot to warn you about the floorboards. A lot of places in there where you could fall through.”

  “How do you know?” Stupid, stupid questions.

  “Oh, I used to come here,” she says, charmingly shifting from one foot to the other. “You know, high school keggers.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  She shrugs, looks almost pensive for a moment, and wraps a tendril of her hair behind her ear. “Not that I was partying. I was in a band at the time.”

  “You sing?”

  “Nah,” she says, “I drum.”

  Awkward pause.

  The phrase “out of my league” doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel at this particular moment in time. And before I can come up with something witty and insightful to say (I’m mentally trying to scan the last issue of the New Yorker I read, oh, six months ago), another car pulls up, this time a massive black SUV with military-grade round headlights. Behind it trails a beige Pinto that sputters and stalls in the middle of the road.

  “Shakespeare!” shouts Nate, jumping out of the black SUV. Lisa looks at me curiously.

  Nate pulls out a giant camouflage backpack, looking like he’s ready to hike the Seven Summits, shoot some commies, or drop out of a helicopter into enemy territory. My messenger bag now looks like a man purse.

  “You Shakespeare’s girlfriend?” he says as he approaches, seeing Lisa.

  “Friend,” says Lisa, neatly putting her hands in her back pockets.

  “Right,” Nate says, keeping his gaze directly at breast level. “What’d you say your name was again?”

  “I didn’t,” she replies coolly. No mittened handshake for you, Nate. Ha.

  Nate turns on his biggest, whitest, thousand-dollar-a-year-at-the-dentist smile. (Nate has a notorious sweet tooth, and we’re often treated to the sound of Mac screaming into his phone about “what a fuckin’ racket” the poor local dentist is running, and “there’s no fuckin’ way” he’ll ever get paid.)

  This is the smile he flashes at Lisa. “Anyone ever tell you that you could be a model?”

  “Creepy guys in bars tell me that all the time.”

  “You’re going to the wrong bars then,” says Nate smoothly. His timing, I hate to admit, is perfect. “I could show you where the cool people go.”

  “Oh,” says Lisa innocently, “and you would know that?”

  Damn, I might just be in love.

  This must not be the usual response to the Nate playbook, because I can almost hear the gears in his mind starting to grind, as if thinking were an exceptional activity in the life of Nate Cheney.

  A raspy voice calls from the now-defunct Pinto. “Do you boys mind giving me a push over to the side of the road?”

  We all look over, and a massive woman heaves herself out of the Pinto, carefully maneuvering the biggest platinum-blond beehive I’ve ever seen through the tiny car door frame, holding the top of it protectively. She wears bright pink polyester pants with matching candy-pink sandals, and a giant diamond-like brooch in the shape of a turtle is pinned above her white pleather jacket pocket. The impressive layers of caked-on makeup would be perfectly suited for, say, a drag queen audition.

  “Holy shit,” whispers Nate.

  For once, Nate has perfectly summed up the situation.

  The woman shakes a pack of cigarettes from a glittering studded purse and expertly slips one out, tapping the end of it on the plastic wrapper. I notice she smokes the same brand as Myrna, and that voice—why is it oddly familiar? It’s the way she flicks the lighter that makes the connection, because I’ve seen Myrna do that a thousand times before in the emergency stairwell of the Eagle. Maddy must be Myrna’s sister. Goddamn, there are two of them.

  “Sometime today?” she mutters, obviously annoyed. “It’s in neutral.” As she puts the cigarette to her pink-lined lips, I notice there are small white daisies painted on her hot pink fingernails. Lisa is trying hard to maintain an appropriately serious expression.

  Reluctantly, Nate and I go to push the car over. I wheeze more than I would like to admit.

  “Myrna was right,” she says as she watches us.

  No further explanation is provided.

  “Hon, who the hell are you?” she says, apparently noticing Lisa for the first time.

  Lisa swallows. “Lisa Bennet.”

  “You don’t look like a Bennet.” Maddy squints her eyes, staring. “Hmmm. I thought so.”

  Again, no explanation.

  “Well,” says Maddy, taking a long and serious drag on her cigarette.
“Let’s get this shit over with.”

  The driveway is at least ten or fifteen miles long. Of course, my daily exercise consists primarily of walking across the street to the local donut shop, so I may not be the best judge of distance. But it is interminable, and for a time I wonder if we’ve entered a parallel universe or singular ring of hell, like I died and don’t realize it—cursed to spend eternity trying to find the Aspinwall mansion in the company of Nate, crazy Maddy, and Lisa. Not that I’m complaining about Lisa, but she strangely hasn’t said more than a few words, and it’s awkward between us, because we know each other by phone only. In person it’s different. I wonder if she’s disappointed. Which makes me trip over an overgrown root. Very manly.

  Finally the mansion comes into view and my first impression isn’t house of horrors—more like crack-den money pit. It looks as decrepit as one might expect for a five-thousand-square-foot Tudor that hasn’t been maintained for the past seventy years. There are gaping holes in the roof (Was there a war I’m unaware of? With bombs?), most—if not all—of the lead-paned windows are broken, and thick ivy obscures the massive oak entry door. Beer bottles and cans are scattered across the overgrown field of a lawn, and the remains of a small bonfire are evident, with plastic buckets arranged into seating around charred logs.

  Lisa bravely leads the way, stepping gingerly over something that may or may not be a used condom, and I’m hoping Nate has a gun in his pack, because we just might need it. The front lock is broken, and the door easily opens with a push from Lisa’s shoulder, giving a horror-movie-quality creak of protest. Lisa waves her hand as if she’s a tour guide.

  “Welcome to Aspinwall,” she says.

  The foyer is truly enormous and designed in filthy rich Victorian style. It’s two stories high (in case you had the occasional need to house a circus tent), features a seven-foot marble fireplace (perfect for roasting medium-sized children), and the ceiling beams are ornately carved with lions, cherubs, and more than a few immodestly bare-breasted women. Every flat surface is plastered and painted to look like an Italianate fresco, continuing the theme of gamboling cherubs and Grecian women. Dangling precariously overhead is an overwrought crystal chandelier that would be amazingly painful if it fell, Tom and Jerry style, on one’s head.

  But then it looks like the mansion had a psychotic break, a schizophrenic episode of sorts, because the walls are papered in paisley and trippy tones of brown, orange, and yellow. The lighting fixtures are red, blobby plastic affairs, and there is one framed Led Zeppelin poster. Spray-painted next to the poster is the quiescent observation “Led Zeppelin sucks.” Next to that someone wittily responded “Suck my dick.” Then, in the true spirit of adolescent repartee, is scribbled, “I would if you had one, asshole.”

  “It’s completely hideous,” I say. “I’ve never seen anything as wonderfully demented.”

  “I knew you’d like it,” says Lisa.

  Is this us clicking?

  “Everyone stop!” shouts Maddy. Strangely, we all do. Apparently psychic hairdresser is in charge. “We need to get in a circle and hold hands.”

  Lisa expertly inserts herself between Maddy and me. I really don’t want to hold Nate’s hand—that’s way above my pay grade.

  “Now,” says Maddy, glaring at us.

  Nate grins evilly, reaches for my hand, and gives it a bone-crushing squeeze.

  Maddy closes her eyes, and I idly wonder if she’ll be able to open them again with all that mascara. “Oh sweet Jesus, we ask for your heavenly protection in this den of sin and immorality. Give us thy guidance, oh Jesus. Keep our immortal souls safe in thy heavenly bosom.” Nate sniggers at that. “This we ask in the name of the Father and the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

  “Amen!” shouts Nate, like it’s a military call and response.

  I say nothing. Maddy looks at Lisa, who is equally quiet.

  “I’m an atheist,” says Lisa.

  “I admire that,” says Nate. “But I could never give up hamburgers.”

  Lisa opens her mouth and closes it just as quickly. She gives me a look, and I shrug to confirm that, yes, this idiot is my editor.

  Maddy just pulls out her cigarettes and sighs. “It’s going to be a long, long night.”

  We decide that since there is no plan of action per se and the floorboards are dicey, we’ll settle into the former dining room, which has a couple of rotted, questionable chairs and plenty of spider webs. The psychedelic wallpaper theme continues, this time with purple blobby colors that trigger a flashback to my hallucinogenic trip. Just looking at them makes me queasy. Maddy sits on a child-sized stool, rolls of butt fat hanging over the edge, and keeps her eyes closed while she mutters a rapid prayer that blurs the words into one barely intelligible sound.

  “OhsweetJesusletthespiritscomeandprotectusinthynameamen.”

  Meanwhile, Nate proceeds to pull a large battery-operated lamp and inflatable chair out of his massive pack. Impressive. The inflatable chair has a built-in air pump, and in about three seconds he’s seated comfortably. I try to pick up one of the dilapidated chairs for Lisa, but the whole thing falls apart as soon as I touch it.

  “Nice one, Shakespeare,” says Nate. “That was probably an antique.”

  “As if you would know.”

  “I’m perfectly comfortable on the floor,” says Lisa, sitting down and arranging her legs cross-legged. I join her, but there’s hardly anything perfect or comfortable about it. My ass is instantly chilled.

  Nate leans back. The chair squishes. “Dad said if nothing happens to just make some shit up.”

  “Oh, that’s just great,” I mutter. “He could have told me that to start, and we could have saved ourselves the trip.”

  “Are you kidding?” says Nate, pulling out a bag of chips from his bag. Of course he also has a cold six-pack in there. “This is going to be a blast. I could stay here all night.”

  Even Lisa’s casting a few envious looks at the inflatable chair.

  “You want to switch?” he asks her.

  “I’m fine,” she says firmly, but we all know she doesn’t mean it.

  “Suit yourself,” says Nate. “Chip?”

  If Lisa goes for the chip, then the beer isn’t far behind. Next thing you know, they’ll be cuddled up on the inflatable chair, feeding each other Lay’s from the bag, talking about bars where the cool people go.

  “You want some coffee?” I ask.

  Lisa shakes her head. “I wish, but I can’t take the caffeine. It’ll keep me up for days.”

  “It’s decaf.” Now I’ll go to hell for sure. But desperate times call for desperate measures.

  “All right, Shakespeare, just a little,” says Lisa wryly. “Maybe it’ll warm me up.”

  Nate glares at me. Two points for Dimitri.

  I pour a steaming cup of my extra-caffeinated coffee into the thermos top and hand it to her, hoping she doesn’t suffer from a heart murmur and that she has excellent health benefits. She takes a sip.

  “This doesn’t taste like decaf,” she says, peering suspiciously into the thermos top. “Tastes Colombian. Like premium dark roast.”

  I give my most innocent shrug. “Maybe because it’s organic.” But I can see Nate suspects something’s up.

  “So, Lisa,” he says. “You must be the friend that works with the elderly.” Is this the same guy who said, “Who gives a shit? They’re just dead old people”?

  “Yeah,” replies Lisa cautiously. “I’ve been working at Crosslands for a few years now.”

  Where’s he going with this?

  “I really admire that,” says Nate. “You know, my grandmother was there before she passed away last year.” He seems to choke up on this last bit.

  “Really. What was your grandmother’s name?”

  “Beatrice, Beatrice Cheney,” says Nate. “It was cancer. Cancer left a hole in the heart of our family.” He presses a meaty paw across his eyes, as if there might be tears.

  Lisa’s brows furrow. With concern? Is she
actually falling for this crap?

  “Beatrice? I don’t remember a Beatrice—”

  “Probably before you started there.”

  “I thought your grandmother lived in Florida,” I say pointedly, twisting the cap back on my thermos. “Near Orlando.”

  “She did… before… she died.”

  Such an evil, unfair play—now I must look like an insensitive jerk. I’m in a bad, bad mental place until Lisa catches my eye and gives me a questioning eyebrow.

  Hallelujah. There is a God.

  Nate sniffs. “Do you have a tissue?”

  “Right, tissue,” says Lisa dryly. “You have an arsenal in your backpack but not a single paper product.”

  “I just didn’t think I’d get so emotional. But this place reminds me of her. It’s so old-timey.” He sighs heavily and snuffles.

  “Okay,” says Lisa, getting to her feet and brushing the residual dust off her jeans. “I wanted to stretch my legs anyways. I can look around, see if anyone’s left some TP or something.” She grabs her bag and gracefully slides it over her shoulder.

  “Want some company?” I ask hopefully. Last thing I need is quality time with Nate.

  “I’m good,” she says with a half smile. “Plus I could use a little break from the whole competing-over-the-girl caveman vibe.”

  Damn. Damn. Damn. She’s onto us.

  Of course, as soon as she’s out of the room, Nate snaps open a beer. He is suddenly dry-eyed.

  “She totally digs me. Don’t worry, Shakespeare, I’ll be gentle with her.” He pops a chip into his mouth, crunching loudly. “You know, I bet she’s got great tits somewhere under that jacket.”

  I wince. But to be honest, I’m thinking the same thing myself—I’m a guy; our brains go there. Plus, I haven’t been with anyone recently. For one thing, the dating pool in New Goshen is dismally limited, unless I want to consider a retiree as a prospective love interest. And I’ve told myself that a relationship would distract me from finishing the Great American Novel I started in college, which is now nearing the one-thousand-page mark, with no end in sight.