The House of Long Shadows Page 15

  Without knowing how many graveyards there had been in the city of Detroit at the time of Ed's burial, I couldn't say whether this was as remarkable a coincidence as it appeared on the surface. I could think of something that would help me clear the matter up, however. There'd been another killer who'd identified himself—a Bradford Cox from Annapolis. If Cox was also buried here, then the voices of those two men in the recording couldn't be chalked up to mere coincidence.

  But, what would it mean?

  Had the spirits of these two brutal men gone walking from the cemetery one night and found themselves at home at 889 Morgan Road? Though I'd considered it sarcastically at the time, was the house I'd bought really some sort of portal to Hell where the foulest spirits had get-togethers? And if that wasn't the case, then what rational explanation was there for the voices of these two men—separated by decades and geographical distance—being heard in my house just yesterday?

  I knew as I started marching through the rows of graves that I was well beyond a “rational” explanation for what was happening. Reason wasn't even a part of the equation anymore. I'd moved beyond that. The best I could hope for would be to hold onto my sanity for the remainder of the renovation.

  For an hour, I plodded around in the muck, looking at tombstone after tombstone.

  As it turned out, there was no Bradford Cox in the lot. Some of the stones were too faded to read, but these especially weathered specimens were dated to the pre-war era. Cox had died in '58, and all of the markers from that period were more or less legible.

  I wasn't sure whether the lack of such a tombstone was reason for relief. On the one hand, Edward Ames' presence in this graveyard, located a quick walk from my house, could very well have been a coincidence. On the other, I'd just burned a precious hour of my morning trudging through the swampy graveyard, obsessed with finding the resting place of a killer who'd died six decades ago.

  Pacing around my van until my boots had begun to dry, I made a promise not to dig too deep into all of this. Something strange—no, singularly supernatural—was definitely going on back at the house, but it wasn't my business to meddle with. If I picked up on a real threat to my safety, I'd reevaluate, but no good would come from my wandering graveyards and reading stories about savage murders. For that matter, I had no reason to listen to any mysterious voices I accidentally caught on tape. I had a feeling that listening to such voices—voices that the living had not been intended to hear—was somehow unwholesome, if not entirely reckless. Like the cold water that had seeped into my boots and now left my socks soaked, the voices on that recording had gotten into me, left my nerves in tatters. It would be unwise to let the specters behind those voices live rent-free in my head, and I vowed to cool my jets in the search for answers about the house.

  The work had to come first.

  If I didn't complete the fix, the whole thing would be for naught.

  The producers at the Home Improvement Network didn't give a shit about Ed Ames, or the body I'd found in the wall, or my bad dreams. They just wanted results. If they didn't get them from me, then they would go looking for another handyman to star in their new series—one who could get the job done.

  Upon returning to the van, I received a call from a local delivery service. Apparently my kitchen cabinetry was on its way, and would arrive that afternoon between the hours of one and two. I agreed to meet the deliverymen there at that time and then pulled away from the curb. The graveyard soon disappeared from my rearview, but as I got closer to the house the creeping fear I'd picked up amongst the tombstones remained. My unease was such that I decided to go driving through the neighborhood for a time. I felt guilty about it, knowing how much time I'd already wasted that morning, but—thanks to the puddles—I had cold feet both literally and figuratively.

  Driving through the time-pummeled streets with the windows down, I saw something I hadn't expected to find.

  A living, breathing person.

  I was rolling along Telluride Road, roughly a mile and a half from my house, when I saw an old woman in a rocking chair. She was taking in the morning air on the porch of a one-story home, leafing through a newspaper and rocking gently. Her hair, a dark grey coil, fell over one shoulder of a threadbare shawl. The houses along Telluride were mostly in shambles, but this one appeared reasonably well-kept. The grass had been cut recently, and there were curtains in the windows—none of which were broken.

  It may not sound like much, but in this part of town that was really out of the ordinary.

  She looked up at my van as I passed and spared me a brief smile before looking back at her paper.

  I was a minute or two past this anomalous, tenanted house, when I suddenly got the urge to turn back. I'd been looking for justifications all morning to postpone my work, and in this woman, I'd found one. It occurred to me that she had probably lived in the area for some time, and that she was likely to know the neighborhood. Perhaps she could even tell me something about the house I was currently fixing up. It wouldn't have to be a time-waster; if I recorded a little interview with the woman, I could use it in one of my videos. Viewers would love that—capturing more of the local color would make my video series all the more authentic.

  I reversed, sped back down Telluride and singled out the house where the woman still sat, reading. Parking across the street behind a rusted-out car that looked as though it had been there through several winters, I went rifling through my bag for my camera. Not wanting to waste time switching batteries and adjusting the tripod, I opted to use my phone to record the video instead. I stepped out of the van.

  The woman looked up at me as she heard my footsteps. The smile she gave me was kind, but guarded, and she set her newspaper on her lap so that she might give me her full attention.

  “Good morning,” I said, putting on a Colgate smile.

  She nodded in greeting.

  “I'm sorry to bother you, ma'am. My name is Kevin Taylor. I'm new to this area.” I paused halfway up her yard, not daring to approach the porch unless I got her say-so. “I'm actually shooting a series of videos about my work here—a kind of documentary—and I was wondering if I could interview you.”

  The woman blinked at me hard, like the sun was in her eyes. And then her eyes widened in delight. “Interview?” She brought a trembling hand to her hair, smoothing out the silver locks. “I... I've never been interviewed before.” Her coy smile told me she wasn't lying, and that she was excited at the prospect.

  I took another step towards the porch and grabbed my phone. “My phone here can shoot in high definition and I can clean up the footage further when I go to edit the video. Do you have a few minutes to talk?”

  Her nod was endearingly eager, and I started up the steps of her porch. There was a large, empty flower pot across from her, left upside-down, which she offered as a seat. I eased myself down and pulled up the camera app on my phone, sizing up a shot of her where the light was good. Now that I was within arm's reach of the woman, I was able to inspect her features more closely, and I admit to being somewhat alarmed at her agedness.

  To put it indelicately, she looked old as dirt.

  Her face was gaunter than it had looked from the van, and her eyes were more sunken. Her hair was thinner from up-close, too. What really gave her the look of someone well into their twilight years were the deep creases that marked her skin. From head to toe, her flesh was plagued by tiny furrows; this made her look like a well-worn leather wallet. Her movements were slow—not feeble, necessarily, but noticeably slow, as though the muscles in her body didn't function so well as once.

  Before I could begin, she leaned forward slightly, gaze narrowing. “Say... what channel did you say you were with?” She ran bony fingers through her hair, preening further. “I'll have to call my grandkids so that they'll know to tune in!”

  I offered a conciliatory smile. “W-Well, it's not actually for TV. I'm a popular user on a website, called VideoTube. I create videos and post them online for people to watc
h. I have a lot of subscribers who watch my videos—millions of people. Maybe someday I'll get a proper TV show, though.”

  This all seemed to go over the woman's head. Before she lost interest or asked me to elaborate on the intricacies of VideoTube, I dove into my questions and began recording.

  “What's your name, ma'am?” I asked.

  “Lillian,” she replied, her face brightening. “Lilian Davis.”

  I decided to banter with her a bit, break the ice. “All right, Lilian. Now, I've been told never to ask a woman her age, but would you think me a brute if I asked you how old you are?”

  “Not at all,” she laughed. “I'm sixty, going on sixty-one this September.”

  I put on a smile, but this answer of hers took me off-guard. The stereotype that women liked lying about their age might have had some merit, but this woman wasn't fooling anyone when she claimed to be sixty. She looked closer to a hundred. If she was sixty years old, then she'd had a very rough six decades by the looks of it—must have prematurely aged.

  Wanting to test her answer further, I asked, “What year were you born?”

  “1957,” she said. Her reply was effortless, required no suspicious pause. Perhaps she was telling the truth and really was sixty, then. I couldn't wrap my head around such premature aging, but wasn't going to get hung up on it.

  “Wonderful. So, I bought a house close by. It's on Morgan Road. Do you know it?”

  She nodded. “Oh, yes, I know it.”

  “How long have you lived in this area?” I chanced. “Do you know it well?”

  “About as well as one can know it,” replied Lilian, grinning. “I moved into this house in the early 80's, with my husband. He's been deceased some years, God rest his soul.”

  “I see. So, what was this area like when you first moved in?” I looked around at the other houses along the street, most of them crumbling. “Was it a busy neighborhood? I can't help noticing that most of the houses around here have been abandoned for a long time.”

  With fondness in her eyes, Lilian leaned back in her rocker and fell into reminisce. “Yes, it was very nice, once. Lots of children. Families. Up until the late eighties or so it was a fine place to live. The houses started emptying out around then; the economy went into a slump, people lost their jobs and some industries pulled out of Detroit altogether, which put a pinch on people. It didn't happen overnight, but now there's hardly anyone living out this way. It's a shame. Some lovely houses hereabouts.” She eyed me curiously. “You say you just moved in close to here? A house on Morgan Road?”

  “That's right,” I said. “889 Morgan Road. Do you know the house?”

  She shook her head. “Can't say I do. Why did you move out here, of all places?” she asked. “Not much for a young man to do around these parts. Do you have a family? Any children?”

  “No,” I replied. “No family. I'm actually fixing up the house I bought. That's what this video series is all about. I do renovations, construction work, and show people how to fix their own houses online.”

  A silence grew up between us for a time. I felt a bit disappointed that she didn't know my house, that she couldn't tell me anything about its past. When she finally spoke again, it was to share some banal tidbit about the winters. She asked where I was from, and when I told her Florida, she claimed to have some family down there she hadn't seen in some time.

  Wanting to steer things back to the subject of my house, I tried another line of questioning. “Were the families who lived out here close-knit? Was it a friendly place?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “All the kids used to play with each other. We'd have neighborhood parties and garage sales. Things were safe enough for a family back then, too. Didn't have to worry about people running off with your kids, or about suspicious types getting up to no good in empty houses.”

  “Right. I wonder if you might have been acquainted with the family that used to live in my house. It was owned by a man named Willard Weiss and his wife, Irma. I believe they had a daughter, too. Fiona?” I paused, waited for her to say she hadn't known the Weiss family, or to trot out another chestnut about neighborhood barbecues.

  What she did instead threw me.

  She chortled. “Will Weiss? You bought his house? Boy, he was a real character, you know that? And you ended up with his house?” She laughed again, patting the arm of her chair as if for mercy. “Oh, the stories I could tell about that man.”

  I perked up. “Tell me some more. Who was Willard Weiss?”

  “Just about the greatest source of local gossip you could ever hope for,” she said. “There's too much to tell. He was something else, that man. Not a good man, mind you, but he gave the rest of us something to talk about back when the area was more lived-in. I myself only met him a couple of times—used to see him around town. Friendly enough, but...”

  “But...?” I prompted.

  “Like I told you, he wasn't a good man. He and that wife of his never got along. Lots of fights. He was stubborn as a mule, but she didn't help things with her howling and screaming. Between you and me, I think she had a screw loose. I don't mind saying that because she's long gone, that woman, but she wasn't a pleasant sort of person even on the best of days. She hardly ever left the house. And when she did, it was only to stand under some tree—the one with white flowers.”

  “The Callery pear tree?” I asked.

  She waved her hand as if she didn't know. “Not sure about what type. Some of the neighbors used to talk about how, on those rare days when she did come out of the house, she'd spend the daylight hours beneath that tree, playing with the flowers and whatnot. The rest of the time...” A flash of color hit her cheeks. “It's probably indecent to air a family's dirty laundry like this,” she said, nodding to the camera.

  “Not at all,” I was quick to answer. “If there's anything too sordid, I'll make sure not to include it. I'm not trying to tarnish anyone's reputation here. I'm mostly recording this for my own benefit, and I'll only use the tamer parts of our talk for the actual video. Sound good?”

  With license to spill all the beans she wished, Lilian leaned forward and did so. “Will Weiss, yeah... Like I was saying, he and his wife didn't always get along. I guess shortly before I moved in here with my husband, they had a daughter who went missing. She was pretty much grown—don't remember how old. Would have been in '79 or '80... something like that... when she ran off on 'em.”

  “Right, Fiona? I understand she was estranged from the family.”

  Lilian nodded. “Never met her; she was gone by the time I moved in, like I said, but to hear others tell it she'd been a weird girl, seldom-seen. Like her mother, she was almost always kept inside. She didn't socialize with the other kids in the neighborhood, even the ones close to her age. They homeschooled her, I think, and it made her anti-social. Eventually, I guess she got tired of dealing with her mother and she ran off when she came of age. Never sent her folks so much as a Christmas card after that. Just lit out one night. Can't blame her, considering. Her mother was overbearing, too hard to deal with. And I think that Irma had some real issues. I remember a rumor went around that she used to hear voices.”

  My heart stalled for an instant, and I found myself wanting to ask a load of questions about these supposed “voices” Irma Weiss had heard. What kinds of voices? Were they the same hideous voices I'd been picking up in my recordings, or were we talking about some kind of mental illness here? I resisted the urge to probe further and let Lilian keep talking.

  “People used to talk about how Will's daughter would go out to the graveyard—sneak out at night, and just sit there. Will and Irma would raise hell about that, and would have to drag her home. I think the girl just wanted to be alone, to breathe the fresh air. A lot of kids in the area used to hang around that graveyard, so it's not like there was anything too weird about it. But they'd force her into the car and take her back home every time, screaming and hollering at her like they were going to kill her.

  “So, wit
hout the daughter at home, I guess Irma just lost it. Poor woman; looking back on it, I really do feel bad for her. She'd been a controlling mother all those years, and when her daughter walked out the door she was left with nothing. Her condition got worse then, and the poor thing looked absolutely ragged. I think she was only in her fifties when she died—must have been almost thirty years ago now. Throughout the 80's, though, her husband, Will, made a real name for himself around town.

  “Will was pretty broken up about his daughter flying the coop, and more than once over the years he moved out of the house out there, on Morgan Road. He started drinking, too. And philandering.” At this, the blush returned, and Irma smirked. “I have it on good authority that Willy Weiss was quite the Lothario in those days. While he went out on his adventures, bedding half the town and living in a bottle, Irma was left in that house all by herself, and I think that's what eventually killed her. He'd pop by to check on her now and then, but he'd never stay. Always had some place better to be. It was a midlife crisis like so many middle-aged men tend to have, but as always, it isn't the men who suffer, it's their wives. He couldn't be bothered to care for his sick wife, not when he felt he had so much life to live. It's possible, too, that he blamed his wife for their daughter skipping town—Irma always had been too controlling. All in all, it's a sad story. A very dysfunctional family.”

  Sensing that Lilian had nothing more to tell about the Weiss family's history, I thanked her for her time. I could think of no less than a dozen questions to ask someone like her, including: “Why are the shadows in my house so damn long?” and “Know anyone in town who might have stashed a dead body in my house?” or even, “Is there some place around here where I can get a good deep dish pizza?”

  “One last thing,” I thought to ask before stopping the recording, “What happened to Willard Weiss? Did he die? Move out of town?”

  Lilian frowned as she searched in her memory for an answer. “Well... I wanna say I was still seeing him around town—at the grocery store, or the liquor store—up until a couple of years ago. He wasn't looking well when I last saw him, whenever that was. Barely recognized him. A life of drinking and chasing skirts will do that to you. It looked like he'd given up the latter but had only dedicated himself further to the former.” She paused. “Now that you mention it, I had a friend who lived around these parts until just a few years back. She kept in touch with some people, and I think she must have run into Will in town, had a chat with him. She said something about how he wasn't doing so well. I think he was planning to move into assisted living or something like that. Was having trouble getting around, couldn't see so well—you know...” She pointed to herself, grinning, “The kinds of problems us old folk tend to deal with.”