The Siren and the Specter Read online

  David couldn’t blame him.

  Still, he watched Ralph pull out of the driveway and felt a good deal better. He tromped down the lane, up the porch steps, and into the dining room of the Alexander House. There, he selected a black wrought-iron poker from the hearth and went immediately up the stairs. If he delayed, he might lose his nerve. Even as he advanced up the final few steps, there was a sizeable region in his brain that threatened to revolt, to steal his resolve and send him clambering down the stairs and out of the house, and at that point there’d be no returning.

  He made it to the second-story landing and into the long bedroom.

  The equipment was as he’d left it. Only the grid scope was still running, its green stars considerably weakened by the morning sun. The thermal camera, he realized, had run out of battery.

  His iPhone lay dead where he’d fumbled it.

  The dropdown ladder from the third story, however, was folded into the ceiling, as if it had never crashed down. David stared up at it, unable to decide if this were a positive development or a negative one.

  If only he had proof….

  “Holy crap,” he said. With a rush of excitement, he bent and scooped up the iPhone. In another few seconds, he’d unscrewed the thermal camera from the tripod and was hurrying from the room. He told himself his haste was due to what he might discover on the iPhone and the camera, but he knew it was just as surely because of his strangling fear of the long bedroom.

  By the time he’d scuttled around the first floor gathering the chargers, his enthusiasm had been replaced with dread, not only of what he might find on the devices, but of what might still be in the house.

  He’d made it to the front door when his shoulders hardened and, as though he were the protagonist in a film, he saw himself, really saw himself standing before the screen door.

  An armload of tech equipment: camera, iPhone, charger cords dangling to his knees. Clothes the same ones he’d worn yesterday and smelling like it. His hair mussed and oily from his night’s adventure. Hell, he hadn’t even brushed his teeth. He loathed morning mouth, couldn’t live with himself until he’d banished that dank, yeasty taste.

  And where exactly was he going?

  More importantly, what did he believe?

  Ralph claimed he was like a dumb movie character returning repeatedly to the place that would spell his doom. Last night, he’d have agreed with Ralph.

  But wasn’t believing in ghosts a greater leap than believing in a hoax?

  Yes, he decided. It sure as hell was.

  There was a rustic carved teak bench on one side of the hallway, and it was on this bench he placed the camera and iPhone while he plugged in the chargers. He set the devices to charge and strode to the bathroom. He took a hot shower and brushed his teeth simultaneously.

  Better. He toweled steam off the mirror and studied his reflection. Slight discoloration under the eyes, but absent of that, no ill effects. His shoulders looked broad, his chest full. He hadn’t skipped his workouts, and it showed.

  Contrast that with Chris, he thought, moving through the den and into the master suite, where he selected a clean T-shirt, clean underwear, and semi-clean cargo shorts. Chris looked to be doing fine financially, but what was abundantly clear was that Chris wasn’t an especially happy human being. More importantly, Chris’s venom during their last conversation revealed a black vein of resentment David had never sensed before.

  But what if it had been there all along? And now, nurtured by time and memory, it had taken hold in Chris and metastasized like a tumor, allowing Chris to go along with, or even orchestrate, an elaborate hoax with his wife.

  David sat on the bed and imagined Katherine laying out her plot to her husband:

  …and the Alexander House is the perfect cash cow.

  But dear, Chris would say, there’s a reason why it’s been uninhabited all these years.

  Because people are imbeciles! she’d answer. The fact that no one has lived in it since that Raftery family died makes it ideal. All we need is your old friend to proclaim it haunted.

  Chris, shaking his head: David would never believe in spirits.

  Katherine, shiny-eyed: He will if we make him believe. Listen, we’ll scare him so badly he’ll end up in an asylum. All we need is for him to allow for the possibility of the paranormal. We get that in print and we’re both rich!

  David nodded. It might not have gone exactly like that, but the essence of it felt true. And which possibility was more difficult to believe?

  The world was fraught with ghosts.

  Or…

  …Chris hated David and was conspiring with his wife to make a fool of him.

  David drummed his fingers on his knees. Only one way to be sure….

  The camera and the iPhone, he decided, wouldn’t be fully juiced by now, but they’d both spent adequate time on their chargers to power on. He went to the hallway, sat on the bench, and thumbed on the camera. He powered on the iPhone too, remembering as he did that he hadn’t checked his email since leaving The Crawdad the night before. He found himself itching to drive into better reception territory so he could see if his agent or publisher had contacted him. Checking his email was something of a compulsion.

  He flipped out the window of the thermal camera and pushed play.

  There’d be nothing for the first couple minutes, he knew, so he fast-forwarded a bit before resuming real time.

  Then, just as he remembered, the shadows on the walls began to worry the green lights of the grid scope. The beds themselves began to ripple.

  David realized he was holding his breath.

  A moment later, from the left corner of the screen he glimpsed a pale flash – the ladder crashing down. The camera, dammit, didn’t have audio, but he’d be able to listen to the voice memo on the iPhone for that.

  David watched the small screen, his windpipe constricting. If he didn’t see anything, that meant…what? That he was cracking up?

  Boots appeared on the ladder steps. Every fiber of David’s being cried out to leave the Alexander House, but he was staying, dammit, staying and watching this recording. He wasn’t running anymore.

  The figure came into view.

  The man was gigantic. He wore what looked like dark breeches of some sort and a white shirt David associated with – hell, he might as well admit it – Puritans. The hulking figure strode fully into view, paused, and for one horrible instant David was certain the man would swivel his head and grin at the camera.

  But he didn’t. Only passed by. David stared at the screen, waited for the man to return. When nothing else happened for more than a minute, David fast-forwarded, squinted down at the camera to detect any movement.

  Nothing.

  He hadn’t been able to distinguish any of the man’s features, so there could be no way of knowing whether it was Chris or

  (Judson Alexander)

  someone else. He reached the end of the recording and went back to the moment when the figure had stopped before the camera; this time David paused it. For some reason, while the man’s hands were ghostly white, the face remained in shadow. It didn’t look like Chris’s profile, but then again, it didn’t look like anyone. Just a vague intimation of a large nose, a protuberant brow, a cruel jaw.

  David set the camera aside and powered up the iPhone. He found the voice memo, pushed play, and listened to the pertinent section of audio twice, thinking he might hear whispering voices or maybe a snatch of conversation in which the hoaxsters revealed their identities.

  But there was nothing. Only the sounds of the crashing ladder, the clumping footsteps, and David’s terrified retreat from the room.

  David pocketed the iPhone. The atmosphere in the house remained a bit too tense for him to relax, but he did know of a place where he could work on his book: Oxrun Park.

  He’d gathered what he
needed and was heading to the Camry when he stopped beside the car, the flesh of his arms spreading in goosebumps.

  David turned and gazed up at the third-story dormer.

  No face stared back at him.

  “Was it you, Chris, or did you hire an actor?” David asked.

  When no one answered, David climbed inside the Camry, started the engine, and rolled down the lane.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Oxrun Park appeared empty. David grabbed his gear from the passenger’s seat and made his way to the small shelter that overlooked the beach.

  He discovered a socket in a wooden shelter support and plugged in his computer, but an errant glimpse at the island across the bay resuscitated a memory from his senior year in college.

  The memory of Anna and their last night together.

  They’d made love on the beach, as they’d done many times. Anna had asked him if he’d spend the night with her in the island woods, but the impracticality of it had made David laugh. They had no sleeping bag, no pillows. No blanket, for that matter, their lovemaking a thing of moonlight and wet sand. Besides, he’d told her as they’d swum back to the shore of Oxrun Park, he had tests for which to study. It was Dead Week, and final exams were looming. While Anna wouldn’t be graduating anytime soon – she was a year younger, and her attendance at lectures was sporadic – David planned on finishing with honors and moving on with his life.

  Truth be told, he was equally anxious to move on from Anna. Not because he was tired of her, but precisely because he wasn’t. Through the first three years of his matriculation at William & Mary, he’d never had trouble ending relationships. After a particularly clingy girlfriend during his junior year in high school, he’d made it a habit to tell girls, up front and with brutal clarity, that he wasn’t looking for anything long-term, that he believed in living in the moment and not darkening his interactions with false promises.

  Of course, this didn’t prevent some women from erupting on him. Claims that he’d misled them, willfully hurt them, or even, in one young woman’s case, “shattered my soul” still abounded. But his conscience remained clear.

  Until Anna.

  He’d given her the same warnings he gave every woman he dated:

  I will never lie to you.

  I will never mistreat you.

  I will never marry you.

  They were reclining in the shallow water that night, David shirtless, Anna in a lime-colored string bikini that covered very little.

  She’d said, “This is the end.”

  He’d turned to her, eyebrows raised.

  “Of our time together,” she explained. “I feel it.”

  “That’s what you want?” David asked.

  She stared at the brilliant moonlit water, her eyes filling. “You just answered my question.”

  David, chafing: “I told you this was temporary.”

  “Ten months, Davey. Nearly a year.”

  He hung his head. It had endured twice as long as any relationship he’d ever had.

  “Saying words that end up being true,” she murmured, “is not the same as being honest.”

  That stopped him. “Anna—”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, not looking at him, “I’m not going to stalk you. I’ll let you go.”

  He reached out, put his hand over hers.

  “That’s for you,” she said.

  “Anna—”

  “You want to walk away but you don’t want to feel bad about it. You’d kiss me right now, hold me, even make love to me, but it would be for you to feel better. You’d be giving me a going-away present, something to remember you by.”

  He withdrew his hand. “That’s a vicious thing to say.”

  “I won’t get mad now, Davey, or at least I won’t show it. But you talking about what’s vicious is hilariously ironic.”

  “Just like the others,” David muttered.

  “Of all the words you’ve spoken, those might be the cruelest,” she said, and he knew she was right. She wasn’t like the others, was the opposite of the others, which was why this was so difficult.

  “You had a tough childhood,” she said.

  “Come on. Not that psychoanalytic bullshit.”

  “At the very least you owe me the chance to speak.”

  He didn’t answer, but he shook his head in disgust.

  “A bad childhood can’t be a neutral, Davey. It can be a negative or a positive, but it can’t be a neutral.”

  “How exactly can a troubled childhood be a positive?”

  “Motivation,” she answered. “Someone with a bad childhood knows better than anyone else how painful it is, how little security a person feels.”

  He suspected where she was going and did all he could to unhear her words, but she was pressing on, and the noose around his throat was tightening and tightening. God, he could scarcely breathe.

  “It did something to you,” she said. “How could it not? Whatever happens to us when we’re young – good or bad – it affects us.”

  “Could you be any more ambiguous?”

  “I’m not as articulate as you. You’ll always be the one who charms people, while I’m just…awkward. Goofy. Guys think I’m pretty, but they don’t take me seriously. Just a poor girl from a blue collar family trying to punch above her weight.” She turned to him. “Did I get that metaphor right?”

  He was horrified to find he had an overwhelming urge to hug her and pepper her face with kisses. God help him, he not only loved Anna, he honest-to-goodness liked her too. Jesus, how could he not?

  “Here’s the point,” she went on. “I know you make it a habit to have a short memory with relationships, and I don’t hold much hope that it’ll make a difference for any of the women who’ll come after me.”

  “Can we just go back to the car?”

  “Soon. Soon it will all be over. You feel it and I feel it, and you’re set on doing this the way you’ve laid out in your head.”

  He laced his hands around his knees. “You make me sound so unfeeling.”

  “I care about you, Davey. I’d tell you again how much I love you, but you’d only accuse me of guilting you for breaking up with me.”

  “Damn it, Anna—”

  “I’m not telling you anything you don’t know.”

  He glared a question at her.

  He saw no accusation in her face. Just a sad species of fascination. “It’s like…emotional Darwinism. You got hurt as a kid, so you changed emotionally. You created this…I don’t know. Filter isn’t the perfect word, but it’s close.”

  “I don’t have a filter,” he said. “I’m just honest.”

  “You call it honesty, Davey, but it’s sifted and processed through this complex system of justifications, and it allows you to move from person to person like an emotional hurricane, leaving them devastated in your wake.”

  “You’re making me into something inhuman.”

  Her gaze was steady. “That won’t work either, Davey. We both know I’m not the one ending it. It’s you. It’s your decision.”

  “Goddammit,” he muttered, and started to get up, but she threw a hand out, grasped him by the shoulder.

  There were tears in her eyes, tears he knew were hot and burning even if they weren’t his. The kind of tears he’d cried as a young child, back when his mom had taken him to church and prayed with him at night and he’d lain in bed alone and railed at God for allowing everything to fall apart, his family, his mother, everything. Pray was what his mom always said when things were terrible, pray was what she said when she should have been doing something to help. Praying was all she did when he was a little kid and his dad kept entering his bed at night and if she’d done something instead of praying, David might not have endured hell at those rough hands, that drunk, whiskery face, that fiendish voice.


  David realized he was grinding his teeth, yearning to strangle that monstrous son of a bitch who dared call himself a father.

  But Anna was going on. “You’re leaving me,” she said. “We both know it. So please give me this one thing. Please allow me the chance to say what I need to.”

  Thoughts of his parents abated, yet his body remained rigid. He couldn’t look at Anna. “Trying to make me feel bad.”

  “You already feel bad. I’m just making you aware of that feeling.”

  “So manipulative….”

  “I can’t manipulate anybody,” she said, and to David she’d never looked so vulnerable. “Least of all you. You’re choosing for this to happen, Davey. That’s what I need you to know. You’re choosing to put an end to this. We get along so well, we hardly ever fight.”

  “Anna….”

  “This makes me sound pathetic, but it’s over anyway, so I might as well say it.”

  He was horrified to find tears threatening in his eyes. “I can’t—”

  “The future you won’t allow is a good one. Maybe even a beautiful one. You know I’d be loving. I’d support you, make you laugh, tell you off when you act like a jerk….”

  “This isn’t doing any good,” he said. He could smell her breath, the gum she chewed and the beer she’d drunk reminding him of some fruity mango drink, and the aroma conjured up a vision of Anna at some all-inclusive resort, a bikini top like she wore now but at sunset, with some kind of swim wrap tied at her hip. She’d wear shades, she’d be smiling at him, and as she strode toward him on the beach he realized there was someone else holding his hand. He looked down and there was a kid, their kid, and the three of them would come together, Anna and David and their daughter, and it was too much, too perfect, and he did rise from the shore then and stumble into the water.

  Anna rose behind him. “You’re choosing this.”

  He was walking away.

  “Remember,” she said, not moving after him, but her voice dogging him. “You’re choosing to end us. Even though it’s wonderful…the best thing in my life….”