Dawes drew in a sharp breath. She was staring at her phone. “Oh God.
Oh God.”
“Who are they?” Alex asked, looking down at the screen, where a welldressed couple was trying to peer through the windows by the front door.
“They look like real estate agents,” said Turner.
But Dawes looked more terrified than when they’d opened a portal to hell.
“Those are Darlington’s parents.”
15
Turner shook his head. “You’re like kids who got caught raiding the liquor cabinet.”
Alex’s mind sped through possible strategies, excuses, elaborate lies.
“Both of you stay out of sight until I take care of them.”
“Alex—”
“Just let me handle them. I’m not going to punch anyone.”
At least she hoped she wasn’t. Translating Latin and tracking down Bible quotes weren’t in her skill set, but she’d been lying to parents most of her life. The problem was she was short on information. Darlington had never talked about his mother and father, only his grandfather, as if he’d sprung from the moss that clung to the stones of the old house and been carefully tended to by an aging and cantankerous gardener.
She needed the old man. The one she occasionally saw lurking around the house in his bathrobe, a pack of crushed Chesterfields in his pocket.
Come on, Alex thought, trying not to panic as she hurried down the stairs.
Where are you?
She could hear the Arlingtons pounding on the kitchen door now. She glanced at Dawes’s phone and saw their frustrated expressions.
“The Mercedes is in the drive,” his father muttered.
“He’s making us wait on purpose.”
“We should have called first.”
“Why?” his mother complained. “He never answers.”
Alex yanked on her sweater, though she was still covered in perspiration from the heat of the ballroom. She needed to cover her tattoos, look respectable, authoritative.
There. The old man was sitting in the sunroom with Cosmo at his feet.
“I need your help,” Alex said.
“What the hell are you doing in my house?” he asked plaintively.
So Alex had been right. He wasn’t some Gray who had wandered in and liked the atmosphere. Ghosts weren’t drawn to empty places naturally. This had to be Darlington’s grandfather.
C’mon. She held out her hand and tugged. The man’s mouth made a startled oh, and then he was rushing into her with a rattle like an old cough.
Alex tasted cigarettes and something tar-like. Cancer. She was tasting cancer.
He’d been weak when he died, in terrible pain, and his rage had burned through him with such glowing heat she could taste it too. She didn’t need his strength, she needed his memories, and they came on clear and fast, just like the Bridegroom’s had when she’d let him into her mind.
She was looking at Black Elm, but it was beautiful, alive, full of light and people. Her father’s friends, the old foreman from the boot shop. She was running through the halls, chasing a white cat out to the garden. It couldn’t be Cosmo, this was too long ago, and yet … the cat turned to look at her with one scarred eye. Bowie Cat.
There had been no brothers and sisters, just a single son, always one boy to tend to the business, to Black Elm. He wasn’t lonely. This was his palace, his fortress, the ship he captained in every game. He was smoking stolen cigarettes up in the tower room, looking out over the trees. He hid his treasures beneath the loose windowsill—comic books and slabs of taffy, then whiskey and smokes and copies of Bachelor. He was watching his father weep as the old man signed the papers that would close the factory. He was pulling Jeannie Bianchi down a dark hall, panting in her ear as he came in her hand.
He dressed in a black suit and grieved his mother. He wore the same black suit to put his father in the ground. He bought his wife a maroon Mercedes and they made love in the back seat, right there in the driveway. “Let’s go to California,” she whispered. “Let’s drive there today.” “Sure,” he said, but he didn’t mean it. Black Elm needed him, as it always had. He was watching her from the doorway to the den, feet curled under her, listening to music he didn’t like or understand, drinking from great big glasses of vodka. She looked at him, stood on unsteady legs, turned the volume up. “It’s going to kill you,” he warned her. “It’s already got your liver.” She turned the music up louder. It did get her in the end. He had to buy a new black suit. But he
couldn’t blame her for not being able to stop. Things you love, things you need, they don’t stop taking.
He was holding a child in his arms, his son … no, his grandson, a second chance to get it right, to forge this boy from factory steel, a true Arlington, strong and capable, not like his fool of a son, weak-willed, flitting from one failure to the next, an embarrassment. If Daniel hadn’t looked so much like an Arlington, he would have suspected that his wife had found some weak-chinned artist to spend her afternoons with. It was like looking into a fun house mirror and seeing yourself sapped of all spine. But he wouldn’t make the same mistakes with Danny.
The house was different now, quiet and dark, no one but Bernadette humming in the kitchen and Danny running through the halls as he once had.
He hadn’t expected to grow old. He hadn’t really understood what old was, his body in gradual rebellion, loneliness crowding in as if it had just been waiting for him to slow down so it could catch him. He had been fearless once. He had been strong. Daniel and his wife canceled their visit. “Good,”
he said. But he didn’t mean it as much as he wanted to.
When had death crept in? How had it known where to find him? Silly question. He’d been living in this tomb for years.
“Kill me, Danny. Do this for me.”
Danny was crying, and for a moment, he saw the boy as he was, not the Arlington paragon, but a child really, lost in the caverns of Black Elm, endlessly tending to her needs. He should tell him to run and never look back, to be free of this place and this withering legacy. Instead he seized the boy’s wrist with his last bit of strength. “They’ll take the house, Danny. They’ll take everything. They’ll keep me alive and drain it all away, saying it’s for my care. Only you can stop them. You must be a knight, just take the morphine and inject it. See, it even looks like a lance.
