The Siren and the Specter Read online

  Hands on knees, David tried to corral his ragged breathing. In movies this was the moment when a neighbor wandered by, declared how spooked the protagonist looked. But a quick glance around the yard showed him he was alone.

  This should have reassured him, but it didn’t. Though he hated to admit it, he craved company now, Ralph in particular. He could head down the lane, see what the older man was up to. Maybe take in an inning or two of the Red Sox, if they were on.

  Or you can do the job you came to do, you pussy.

  He cringed. The voice had sounded eerily like his father’s.

  David scowled at the seven dormers of the Alexander House. He hated his father’s voice. It represented everything that could go wrong when notions of masculinity were bound up with stoicism, with callousness, with proving one’s strength to the detriment of others. But maybe, for once, he needed to heed his father’s advice.

  The book wouldn’t get written if he cowered out here.

  He told himself it had all been in his head. The legends, The Last Haunting, and his overactive imagination conspiring to conjure spirits when there was nothing here but an old house.

  The sweat drying on his skin, David moved reluctantly toward the porch.

  He kept his eyes down, studiously shunning the window of the long bedroom.

  Chapter Nine

  “It is the evening of June the second, and I’m staring out at the Rappahannock from the screened-in porch of the Alexander House,” David said into the voice memo recorder of his phone. “The facts of the case are these….”

  He shook his head, pushed stop, and erased the recording. This wasn’t a ‘case’; it was an assignment, a job. Calling it a case gave it a more mysterious aura, and though there was a mystery to be solved – how Mansfield and Hartenstein murdered John Weir – the present circumstances were far more straightforward: Katherine Mayr wanted David to turn this property into a tourist attraction by admitting the existence of the supernatural. David would not. David would, however, help Chris by proclaiming the house as normal as any other.

  At the thought of Chris, he experienced a pang of guilt.

  You abandoned him. Him and Anna both.

  David blew out an aggravated breath, pushed record. “The…situation is this: the Alexander House has a notorious reputation. The home’s age, the deaths of a handful of its occupants, and the unfortunate popularity of a lurid work of sensationalism have imbued this venerable property with that dreaded appellation: haunted house.”

  He pushed stop. Not bad, but he’d have to curtail his contemptuous tone when he committed these words to paper. As his agent was fond of reminding him, the majority of his audience bought his books because they wanted to believe in ghosts.

  Okay, he thought. Then humor them. Just a little.

  “Having completed my first twenty-four hours in the Alexander House, I must confide how impressed I am. It was only by screwing up my courage that I was able to explore the second story today, and when I was skulking through the rooms, I did feel, if only for a moment, that something unnatural might dwell here.”

  David smiled. His agent would love that, as would his editor. David knew very well what both of them wanted, so he reveled in withholding it. And when he did give them a passage of fright, they responded orgasmically and clamored for more.

  Well, they’d been loyal to him. David supposed he could string them along.

  “I teach a story in my American Gothic Tradition course called ‘Moonlight Sonata,’ by Alexander Woollcott. The tale was made famous by its inclusion in the sublime Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, one of the class’s required texts. In that story, the main character discovers a figure in a rocking chair, sitting in a spill of moonlight, plucking the hairs, one by one, of a severed head. Despite the fact that the discovery renders ‘Moonlight Sonata’ a simple tale of murder, the image is an indelible one, and I confess to experiencing a shiver of delight when my students gasp aloud at Woollcott’s gruesome revelation.

  “I also confess to a recollection of Woollcott’s macabre tale this afternoon. Despite it being June in Virginia with temperatures regularly in the nineties, the long bedroom proved to be uncommonly frigid. Aside from that….” David hesitated, experienced a moment’s reluctance at mentioning the scrimshaw canoe, finally decided he’d throw that in as well.

  By the time he finished recounting his experience in the bedroom, he’d begun to sweat, and not from the humidity of the evening. He wished Ralph had joined him for dinner, but when six o’clock had come and gone with no sign of the older man, and David had ventured down to Ralph’s house, he’d found a note taped to the front door declaring that Ralph wasn’t feeling well and had gone to bed.

  David drummed his fingers on the table. The burgers he’d made were overcooked and sat uneasily in his belly. Even the beer David was nursing tasted foul, the Budweiser too metallic, the heat making the can sweat in his grip.

  He sat forward, eyeing his phone. He considered deleting the voice memo. How ironic would it be, he mused, if David were to go missing and the only record of his stay here was a breathless recording of his weird experience upstairs? He would become an even truer successor to John Weir: another skeptic claimed by the spirits he was attempting to debunk.

  As far-fetched as this was, it made him restless. He stood and pocketed the phone, resolving if anything did happen to him, he’d make sure his last words on earth didn’t sound like a recanting of everything he believed.

  What to do now?

  David craned his head toward the dock, his mouth opening in a smile.

  The kayaks!

  Oh man, he thought, setting off in that direction, how lovely it would be to scythe through the water in the deepening dusk. In another twenty minutes it would be full dark, just him and the moon and the Rappahannock. And he knew where he’d go, too.

  The island. He knew his experience of the night before had been imagination – the notion of a woman floating backward over the water while serenading him was the stuff of overripe Gothic romance – yet it had wrought one positive outcome: it had made him aware of the island.

  The prospect captivated him. He remembered an island just like it in college. He and Chris and Anna whickering through the night on a rope swing, somersaulting into the river, lazily backstroking out to the island, where they’d lazed in the shallows, the sand gritty but somehow pleasing to the touch. Funny, he thought as he reached the tall grass half concealing the kayaks. The island from here looked a good deal like the one they’d frequented back then. This was, after all, the same area of the Rappahannock they’d once explored back in their days at William & Mary.

  David shook off the thought. Coincidences happened, but that would be too much. For how long did the Rappahannock meander through the countryside? A hundred and fifty miles? The odds that this was the very same island they’d once loved were too scant to consider.

  He waded through the grass, the dew dampening his leg hair, and grasped the edge of a kayak. He overturned it and sucked in breath as a long black snake slithered toward him. David danced away, nearly fell, and was about to take off at a sprint when the snake changed course and headed toward the shore.

  “Jesus,” he muttered. Six feet long at least. He didn’t know what species it was, but it looked like something that could kill a man.

  Moving with more caution, David returned to the kayak, selected a plastic oar, and dragged the boat toward the bank. He placed the oar inside, nosed the kayak into the water a few feet from the dock. When he thought he’d reached a point where he could safely enter the boat but still push off with the oar, he climbed inside. He was out of practice and nearly capsized, but after a minute of fuss, he found himself floating toward the main Rappahannock.

  Lord, but the night was beautiful. He had a momentary worry of some angler’s bass-fishing boat appearing out of nowhere and nailing him b
roadside, but as the kayak sliced through the water, the river opening up around him, he realized he was entirely alone out here, the only signs of human existence the twinkling lights on the distant shore, and those so intermittent they might as well not have existed.

  He was twenty yards into the main river before he noticed the large brick house to his right. His good spirits vanished. The Shelby home was lit up like a gambling riverboat, the picture windows plating the waterside glowing tangerine and yellow and, in the family room, the antifreeze blue of the giant projection television. David wondered what kind of porn Honey was watching tonight and whether the little girl was still in the corner with her coloring books.

  Had the kid eaten anything but Kool-Aid today? Had the boy spent the afternoon machine-gunning terrorists and evading the fisticuffs between his mom and dad?

  David’s stomach performed a slow, sickening roll. He switched his oar to the right, dug into the water to move away from the Shelby house. As the kayak knifed through the water, moving steadily toward the place where the Rappahannock opened up, he again considered reporting the Shelbys to Child Protective Services. He couldn’t imagine CPS making his name known to the Shelbys, and even if they did, who the hell cared? He wanted them to know his contempt for them, wanted them to know that someone was aware of their negligence and…

  …and abuse. Hell yes, he thought, paddling steadily. It sure as hell was abuse. David had experienced firsthand what it was like to be ignored, to be treated like dirt, to be hit.

  The tide of remembrance slugged him in the throat, made it difficult to breathe. God, he hadn’t thought of his childhood forever, and the way those dark times had been dredged up made him hate the Shelbys even more.

  Be quiet, Davey. Daddy’s home.

  Shhh, sweetie. We can play when Daddy goes.

  Then his father: What the hell have you been doing all day, Shelly? Don’t fucking work, the house looks like a landfill. You and David probably spent the afternoon watching TV, didn’t you?

  In fact, David and his mother did used to spend all afternoon watching TV. It was calming, she used to inform David. Easier on her nerves. He hadn’t realized then she was popping pills. How could he? He was a fucking kid.

  Quit crying, goddammit. I mean it, Shelly. You’re the reason our son’s such a sissy.

  A slap for Shelly.

  A spanking for David. On one occasion his dad swatted him so hard that David had shat blood.

  When his dad had finally tired of abusing his wife and son and left for good when David was eight, David had believed life would be grand.

  It turned out, the pills’ hold on his mother had tightened to the point that she was incapable of mothering. With no money, no car, and no real family – her parents had died in a car accident, and David’s paternal grandparents were as nasty as his father – David and his mom had subsisted on food stamps and the charity of neighbors. By the time David was eleven, it was apparent that Shelly was unfit for motherhood. She handed David over to the county, and he never saw her again.

  The tears streaming over his cheeks caught him unawares. David placed the oar in his lap and wiped them roughly away.

  He was nearly to the bend in the river, where he shifted the oar to the left and made for the shoreline. The approach to the bay would be calmer there, the current less swift.

  The gigantic deadfalls along the shore reminded him of fantasy novels, post-apocalyptic epics in which the planet had been obliterated by nuclear war or an alien attack. The moon broadcast its ghostly luminescence over the uprooted trees and the piled, glistening boughs. Though it carried him into a stronger current, David steered well clear of the shore. He had no desire to ram a barely hidden stump or capsize on a snarl of lurking branches.

  With a glance ahead he saw the island. It was larger than he’d judged last night. The sandy shore ringed this side of the island in a luminous white penumbra; the trees stood sentry several yards in, their mossy trunks uniformly spaced, the underbrush thick and obeisant.

  David twitched, a psychic whisper passing through him. Yes, there are many islands in this river, but how many are there like this one?

  Impossible, he thought.

  It’s the same island. The one you shared with Anna.

  The current had towed him toward the broader part of the river. Not wanting to spend all night fighting his way back, David went to work, his powerful upper body more than equal to the task. By the time he made it past the deadfalls, he was perspiring freely, but dammit, it felt good. Since his humiliating experience in the long bedroom, he’d been feeling reduced and weak. Now, with the moon spangling the black water and his muscles pumping, he was back in control, strong again.

  But when he discovered the public beach that had been hidden by the outcropping deadfalls, his arms went slack, the oar clunking on the kayak floor between his feet.

  It couldn’t be, but it was. There could be no mistaking the swings, the slide, the shelter.

  The sign reading ‘Oxrun Park.’

  The sight of this place, the realization he’d come to it accidentally but unerringly, suffused him with a nameless dread.

  Oxrun Park.

  The last place he’d been with Anna.

  A month before she committed suicide.

  Chapter Ten

  David rowed toward shore, but he couldn’t arrange his thoughts, which tumbled over him like boulders in a rockslide:

  This was where he and Anna had spent their last evening together.

  The last time she’d asked David to make love.

  The only time he’d refused her.

  The most cruelly he’d ever treated her. Ever treated anyone.

  Chris had told him he’d forgiven him for Anna’s death, but what if he hadn’t? Had Chris bought the Alexander House because of its proximity to the park, the island? And if so, what bizarre aim could Chris possibly have in doing so? He must have known David would discover the truth eventually.

  Unexpectedly, the nose of the kayak met sand, and David was catapulted into the hard plastic coaming. Rubbing his chest, he climbed out and dragged the kayak onto the beach.

  Oxrun Park was the same in most details. One exception: an old-fashioned teeter-totter had been replaced with a pair of seahorses on giant steel springs that allowed you to rock back and forth.

  Here was the slide. He remembered Anna whooshing down its satiny silver length, not quite nailing the landing.

  Gracefully clumsy. Endearingly goofy. God, he’d loved her.

  He could almost see her, her Red Sox cap worn backward – Ralph would have approved – as she raced toward the swings. She’d worn gray shorts that night that showed her tanned legs to delirious effect. A red tank top. Bare feet, her flip-flops abandoned in Chris’s car. Chris was always the driver so David and Anna could drink.

  David could almost smell the beer as he roved over the sandy beach. He remembered tasting the beer on Anna’s mouth, their hot tongues clashing. A wave of desire scudded through him, and he allowed himself to imagine her body. She wasn’t tall, wasn’t built like a supermodel, but she’d aroused him like no woman had then or since. Yet she’d only been twenty-one, a year younger than David and Chris. An intelligent but emotionally raw girl who told him she loved him after the third date, who scared him with the power of her affection.

  Perhaps, he reflected as he reached a copse of trees, it had been his love for her that had doomed them.

  She wasn’t clingy. Had she been possessive, like so many women David had known, breaking up with her wouldn’t have been so painful. But she hadn’t been needy at all, had merely told him how she felt and made it clear she wanted a future with him.

  And God help him, he’d wanted it too. Or part of him had. And not just the libidinous part of him, the creature of the night he indulged too often, who was maybe no better than Honey with her porn flicks.


  No, it had been the emotional, receptive compartment within his…he dared not call it his heart…within his being that longed to remain with Anna. When they’d been together – only a year, but in many ways the best year of his life – he’d found himself entertaining the possibility of marriage, of raising children with her.

  Yes, he thought, weaving between the trees. Breaking up with Anna had been the levelheaded decision. He couldn’t have known what it would do to her, couldn’t hold himself responsible for her suicide.

  David emerged from the trees and froze, mouth opening.

  The nearest swing pendulumed back and forth.

  The wind, he thought hollowly.

  But there was no wind, no breeze at all. And the other swings, three of them, didn’t stir.

  Laughter, light and insouciant, echoed behind him.

  David whirled, heart thundering, and peered through the trees. He leaned forward, straining to see through the shadows to the beach beyond. He heard a scraping noise.

  David plunged through the trees, his shoulder gored by branches. He angled toward the beach, but that carried him off the path. He stumbled over a bent sapling, half twisted his ankle on a root. Teeth bared, he charged on, and through the remaining trees he caught the sound of splashing, of a disturbance along the shore.

  David burst through a tangle of bushes and scampered toward the beach.

  The kayak was gone.

  No, he realized, not gone, but adrift. Someone had dragged it into the water and given it a shove. It was already fifteen yards out. Soon it would catch the current and be swallowed up by the Rappahannock. Without pause, David bolted toward the water, leaped, realized he might be hurtling straight at the shallow river bottom. He entered at too steep an angle and raked his chin along the river floor. The pebbles harrowed his chest. He scarcely registered this because he glimpsed something trawling through the water in the other direction. For a moment he almost followed. But if he didn’t reach the kayak soon he’d be stranded out here, and then what? It would be, at minimum, a forty minutes’ swim across the Rappahannock. He thought he could do it, and he was relatively certain he could touch the river bottom most of the way there. But what if it dropped off? Even at a seven-foot depth he could drown. Then his worst nightmare would be realized: FAMED MYTHBUSTER DISAPPEARS ON FINAL CASE!