A Brilliant Death (7 page)

The beam of my light scanned the attic. It had a low peak, with several one-by-eight planks lying haphazardly across the rafters to walk on. It smelled musty, and faintly of dust and old newspapers. Cardboard boxes of junk lay scattered around. One box, which had split at the corner, was full of hard-core porno magazines that had spilled into the insulation. I shined my light over the magazines. “Big Frank has quite an extensive library,” I said.

“Yeah, he’s a connoisseur of fine literature,” Travis countered, balancing himself on the rafters and making his way to the furthest stack of boxes. Travis began sorting through the boxes, which mostly contained the accumulated junk of three failed marriages. One entire box was dedicated to legal documents from Big Frank’s previous divorces. There were several boxes of Christmas ornaments, old clothes, and the miscellaneous junk that you would find in any attic. Just a few minutes into the venture, sweat was rolling down my cheeks. We picked through the heaps of boxes and dust, none of which contained a single item relating to Travis’s mother. We had scavenged nearly the entire attic when he moved a box containing old car magazines and revealed a large clothing box jammed between two rafters and resting atop the insulation. It had a plastic handle, was big enough to hold a woman’s coat, and had come from the Hub Department Store in Steubenville. It was yellowed with age and creased in the middle where a piece of twine was cinched tight. Travis dug his hand deep into the insulation and, as though he suspected the box contained the treasure he was seeking, gently lifted it out of its resting place. He worked the knotted twine down the sides of the box, allowing it to breathe for the first time in many years.

Travis pulled the lid from the box and for several moments shined his light on its contents. Lying in the box was a red leather book, the gold embossed word
Diary
barely recognizable across the top. There was a stack of yellowed envelopes bound by a brittle rubber band, three high school yearbooks, two thick scrapbooks, a white letter sweater with three maroon stripes on one sleeve and a maroon, chenille “N” over one pocket, a variety of other papers and treasures of youth, and a cigar-box-sized wooden chest with tarnished brass fittings. Travis lifted the diary from the box and opened it to the middle. The pages were yellowed at the corners and full of a light blue, blotchy script that had been put down with a fountain pen. Photographs and newspaper clippings were scattered throughout the diary like so many bookmarks. “This was my mom’s,” Travis said. “This was her diary.” He flipped back to the front page. There was a black line under the words
Property Of
, on which was written in the same blue ink script,
Amanda Virdon
. He began reading silently, and I felt like a voyeur, as though I was looking into the window of a very private part of his life. When he picked up the envelopes, the rubber band crumbled into the box. He thumbed through the bundle like a young boy with a new pack of baseball cards. He opened one and gently unfolded the two pages inside, cradling it with the care usually reserved for ancient scrolls. “They’re all from her father,” Travis said.

“How do you know?”

“This one’s from him and all the others have the same return address.” He read aloud:
“I hope you have truly found happiness. Even a good marriage is sometimes difficult to make work. There will be tough times, but you are my flesh and blood, and strong. You can make it work. I wish you much happiness, my darling daughter.”

He slid the letters back into the box. “Kinda personal. I think I’ll read this stuff later,” he said, pulling the wooden chest from the box. There was a tiny bar on a brass chain holding the front clasp together. The box was full of trinkets and mementos from Amanda Virdon’s adolescence—a class ring, a locket, several medals on faded strands of ribbon, a fountain pen, a graduation tassel, and several wallet-sized, black-and-white photos. There were three identical head-and-shoulder photos of a dark-haired woman in a white graduation gown, her head tilted up slightly and to the side. Soft brown curls dangled against her naked shoulders.

“That’s my mom,” he said, barely audible. In the faint light I could see tears welling in both eyes. “I never even knew what she looked like ’til just now.” He held the flashlight’s beam on the photo for several minutes, drinking in the image that was, in part, a large piece of the mystery. “She was pretty, wasn’t she?”

“Are you kidding me? She was beautiful.”

He shook his head. “Makes you wonder what the hell she was thinking when she married Big Frank.”

“My dad always says that there’s no accounting for taste.”

Travis reached back into the box and pulled out another photo—a curled, black-and-white Polaroid of the same woman standing on the beach, resting her head on the shoulder of a young man with thick black hair, a wide smile, and washboard abdominal muscles that looked like they were chiseled out of stone. “Look at this.” Travis said, passing me the photo.

“She was a beauty, Trav. She should have married that guy.”

Travis smiled as he took back the photo. “She did.”

I reclaimed the photo for a closer examination. The Big Frank Baron I knew rarely smiled. He was balding and had a belly so large that the slightest physical activity caused him to suck for air and gurgle deep in his throat. “That’s Big Frank?”

Travis nodded.

“Holy smoke. What the hell happened to him?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere along the line he decided that fat and insufferable was preferable to trim and happy.”

For several more moments, he squatted on the rafters, the image of his mother disappearing with the fading beam of his light. I was happy for Travis. He had found the first clue in his quest. The letters and the diary would, I hoped, supply some of the answers he sought.

I only wished he could have enjoyed the moment longer; unfortunately, the silence was broken by the unmistakable grind of the downshifting of Big Frank’s Kenworth as he pulled it onto the gravel at the back of the property. For a moment we stared at each other, frozen, praying the grind was a figment of our collective imaginations. Then, our collective imaginations heard the air brakes release. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. It’s Big Frank,” Travis yelped, walking a rafter like a tightrope to the opening. “He’ll kill me if he catches us up here.”

“You said he was going out of town,” I yelled in a whisper.

“Well, that’s what he said. I don’t know why he’s back. Quick, help me down.”

I snagged Travis’s wrists and helped lower him through the opening. I started to follow. “No. Christ, I’m not supposed to have anyone in the house. Stay up there ’til he leaves. He probably just forgot something and will be gone in a minute.”

There was no time to argue. I slid the plywood cover over the hatch and listened as Travis shoved the stepladder under the bed and slammed the closet door. With the last of the dwindling light from my flashlight, I maneuvered away from the hatch and stood straddling two rafters. When my light faded, I was left in darkness, with only slivers of faint light filtering through the vent at the rear of the house. The front door slammed and I strained to hear the conversation between Big Frank and Travis. Unfortunately, the conversation was becoming clearer by the second. The steps groaned as Big Frank started upstairs. His shipment hadn’t been ready and wouldn’t be ready until later in the afternoon.

It is astounding how still and quiet one can be when one thinks that the slightest move might result in immediate death. I could hear them talking and walking into the bedroom, following each creak of the floorboards, when I clearly heard Big Frank say, “I’m going to sack out for a while, so don’t be makin’ a bunch of goddamn noise.”

It had been a good life, I suppose, for someone who had yet to see his fifteenth birthday. Besides never having had sex or gotten drunk, I don’t know that I missed all that much, although sex is obviously a big thing to die without, I would think. It was, however, too late to remedy that, as I figured my death was imminent. After all, I was straddling the rafters over the bed of a napping Frank Baron. Big, mean, paranoid, hateful, sleep-with-a-.45-caliber-semiautomatic-pistol-on-his-nightstand Frank Baron.

I did the only thing I could do in such a situation, which was nothing. I straddled the rafters and looked straight ahead, concentrating on breathing through my nose and staring at the ventilation grate on the far wall. I remembered reading about prisoners of war who helped save their sanity and pass the time by building houses, brick-by-brick, in their minds. I tried that, but it failed. I didn’t know how to build a house, and I couldn’t get past the first few bricks before the mental image of rotund Frank Baron snoring in his boxer shorts crept back into my mind. If sheer fear wasn’t bad enough, I was suddenly suffering from sensory overload. Parts of my body that had never itched in my life were screaming to be scratched. My bladder, I was sure, was close to rupture. And I wanted to sneeze, fart, cough, and belch. I was fighting the release of a bodily function cacophony that would literally shake the rafters. Scattered at my feet were Big Frank’s porn magazines. I stared at them and became semi-erect, creating additional angst.

Adding to this misery was the fact that it was a hot day for early October, and the sun was heating the attic to a broil. Every pore in my face was leaking, causing little droplets of sweat to boil up on my skin until they began a maddening roll down my face, dropping in succession from my nose and chin, or rolling down my neck in a ticklish torture. Soon my shirt was soaked and flush against my chest. My jeans had a ring of sweat several inches past my waist. What sweat didn’t drip off eventually ran down my legs and into my tennis shoes, which I was sure would squish if I ever got the chance to walk again.

My legs began to cramp above the knees. The calves followed suit. I couldn’t move to rub them for fear of making the rafters creak and causing Big Frank to send three or four salvos into the ceiling. Eventually, the cramps subsided, but I could no longer control my bladder. It is miserable and humiliating to piss your pants when you are nearly fifteen years old, but it was such a relief that I was willing to ignore the shame. My jeans, shorts, socks and tennis shoes were now soaked, and the stench of urine was added to that of must and dust.

I prayed to God to get me out of Big Frank’s house alive. And I made a solemn vow that if he allowed me to escape, to live and again breathe fresh air, I would repay his gracious and divine intervention by strangling my best friend Travis.

Then my mouth and nostrils were dry and my legs were starting to spasm. Below me, Frank was farting in his sleep. I was getting woozy, like you do when you stand up too quick, but I couldn’t shake the feeling and I was forced to hold on to the crossbeam, resting my head in the crease of my elbow. I hoped that if I lost consciousness and fell through the ceiling that I’d land directly on Big Frank and render him unconscious just long enough to get out of the house.

I didn’t know if I had been in the attic four hours or four days when Big Frank finally awoke. I think I had actually dozed for a while, or possibly passed out. Either that or I was loopy from dehydration. However long it had been, it was apparently longer than Big Frank had wanted to sleep. I heard the bed springs squeak and him say, “Oh, shit.” This was followed by both heavy footfalls and profanity. “Why did you let me sleep so long, goddammit,” he yelled at Travis as he ran down the steps. I heard the toilet flush and the back door slam. It was another minute before the truck pulled away, and several more before Travis pushed open the attic door and the beam of his light entered the attic.

“I hope you’re not going to hold me personally responsible for that,” Travis said.

“Just who else would I hold personally responsible?” I yelled. “This was all your idea, remember?”

“Jesus, Mitch, I’m sorry. I didn’t know he was coming back. He said he . . .” Travis shined his light over me. “Man, you look awful. Did you piss yourself or something?”

Travis struggled to get up through the hatch but seemed to know better than to ask for my help. I lowered myself to one of the one-by-eights and sat, massaging my thighs and calves while Travis gathered up the box of treasures he had found. “Come on,” he said, slapping at my shoulder. “You can jump in the shower, and I’ll throw your clothes in the washer. Then we’ve got to hide this stuff.”

“You better leave it up here,” I said, struggling to get back to my feet. “If Big Frank catches you with it, you’re dead meat.”

“He’ll never find it. I know the perfect hiding place.”

I started to ease myself down the hatch. “Where’s that?”

“Your house.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

In the months that passed after my near-death experience in Big Frank’s attic, my perspective on the entire ordeal changed. Rather than viewing it for what it had actually been—another insane situation into which I had allowed Travis to con me—I began seeing it as the ultimate test of my manhood. And I had indeed passed. I was a gladiator, a fearless warrior whose incredible courage had enabled him to return home after a great battle. I had been tested, and in my mind’s eye I was better for the experience. It was amusing that I viewed myself as some kind of stouthearted war hero—Sir Mitchell the Bold—when, of course, I had been scared totally witless.

The collection of literature and baubles that we had mined in the attic were keeping Travis busy, so he was not causing me much discomfort with Operation Amanda. For a while, I assumed that he had learned all that he wanted about his mother. He had located a photo, her diary, and newspaper clippings. This, of course, was not going to settle the mystery of her death, but I believed that was beyond our reach.

Travis made regular trips to the cemetery to visit the memorial garden erected in his mom’s memory, dragging me along with him more often than not. At least once a month we would find fresh flowers placed within the semicircle of granite benches or lying on the inscribed stone. During a Saturday morning visit in December we found the snow had been brushed from the stone and a pair of men’s boot prints led to and from the grave. It had stopped snowing at eight o’clock the previous night, so whoever had visited the grave had done so under the cover of night. The prints obviously didn’t belong to Big Frank, and Travis found it quite perplexing that someone was making regular visits to what amounted to his mother’s grave.