Crooked House (20 page)

He thought so.

Robert went into the home e-mail he shared with Sarah and began typing a message:

Hey Sarah,

Last night
, I was a royal ass. I let you down. What you could have used was a man willing to stand up for your honor, a real knight in shining armor. What you got was a putz.

I’m sorry.

I’m guilty as charged.

Look, I want to explain it all, and I wish I was the kind of man who could sit in front of you and say it in words, but we both know that isn’t me
. I do my best thinking at this keyboard, and since you’ve been gone, I’ve been thinking a lot.

I’ve been thinking how mad I am
. I’ve been thinking that you fucking blew some guy you didn’t even know – and did it for money no less – while we were dating. While I was trying to put my life and my feelings and my love for you in some kind of order. While I was trying to make it all make sense to my twenty-six-year-old brain. You came into my life with a kid and (let’s face it, we both know it’s true) some serious emotional baggage, like your father, your relationship with Jay, all of it. But I fell in love with you. I fell in love with you even though you and the responsibilities that came with loving you scared me to death. That’s how crazy in love with you I was.

I confess I could use some emotional sophistication
– even now, at 36 – but this is what you married. You agreed to this guy. You have to be the one to put this into some kind of sense for me, because you’re the one who made it all not make sense.

So please, respond.

But first, before you fire off some broadside, know that I love you. You said that to me, and I was too mad – too chickenshit, maybe – to say it back. But I do. I love you. With all my heart. I am, and always will be, the man who loves you with every – ”

With every what?

Christ, what was there for a man to say at this point that didn’t sound like the worst sort of
cliché ever spoken?

He put his head down on his keyboard and groaned
. This was fake, all of it. The e-mail, the sentiment behind it, his own conceited belief that he could put so much feeling into an e-mail that it would save his marriage. Fake.

Such things were the
province of poets, not scholars.

This wasn’t working
. He saved the message into his Drafts folder and folded up the laptop. Maybe she’d read it later.

Robert heard a noise from the far side of the room, and when he looked up, James Crook, wearing a tuxedo, the antique bat resting on his shoulder, was standing in the corner, looking at the ruined pictures on the wall.

“Hey,” Robert said. “Hey, you’re...”

Crook glanced over at him
. “I’m in all of these. Did you know that?”

“Huh?”

“These pictures. Like this one. I’m right here, second row, third from the left.”

“But you’re...you’re...”

He was older than Robert, but didn’t look it. He was taller, leaner, a handsome man with slicked-back black hair and a little pencil thin mustache and the easy, catlike grace of an athlete. He smiled, and his teeth were perfect.

The kind of smile
you’d expect from a dentist, Robert thought.

“I’m what, Bob?”

“You’re James Crook, the man who built this house. But you’re...you’re...”

Crook was smiling
. Robert had trouble catching his breath. His head still hurt and he was foggy with lack of sleep and confused by the strangeness of seeing this man here, and talking with him, a man he knew to be dead. He tried again.

“But...you’re dead
. Aren’t you?”

Crook frowned, then started laughing.

“But you died eighty years ago. You hanged yourself.” Robert looked up, into the rafters. Even in the gathering shadows of late afternoon, he thought he could see the faint cut in the wood, the groove left by the rope. What had it been, a week that he’d hung there, before someone thought to check on him? He must have gotten really ripe in the Texas heat, with no air conditioner. The skin would have stretched and blackened as the body filled with decomposition gases. In a week’s time, at that temperature, he would have burst. It would have gotten all over everything. “It was right there,” Robert said. “Right there.”

Crook wasn’t laughing anymore, but h
e
wa
s
smiling. It was a bland, polite smile, utterly blank.

He looked like he was waiting for Robert to come to a point.

“This is your house,” Robert said. “I’m sorry. I’m sitting at your desk.”

“Doesn’t look like my office,” Crook said
. Robert stood up. He watched Crook cross the room, mesmerized by the bat twirling in his hands. It was so effortless, so practiced. He’d watched so many ball games where players headed up to the plate with the bat moving like that, with such unconscious grace. He felt like a rabbit watching a snake. Then Crook was standing opposite him, across the desk. He extended the bat and swung it slowly, with deliberate care, letting it just touch the tip of Robert’s ear. Crook was smiling the whole time. “That’s the sweet spot right there,” Crook said. “Right on the meat of the bat. That ball is gone.”

Then he pulled the bat back, flipped it around, and held the handle out for Robert to take.

Robert looked at it, his head still swirling.

“Go on, take it,” Crook said
. “It belongs to the man of the house.”

“But you...”

“You’re the man of the house, Bob.”

“It’s Robert
. I don’t go by – ”

“And I don’t go in for pretentious crap, Bob
. Familiarizing a man’s name is a sign of camaraderie. It’s how men behave around other men. My momma named me James Crook, but no friend of mine ever called me anything but Jim.”

Crook forced the bat into his hands.

“But then, that’s kind of the root of the problem, isn’t it, Bob? You got yourself a case of the uppity wife, don’t you? We’re both men here, Bob. You don’t mind me talking straight to you, do you, Bob? What you got on your hands is a wife who’s pretty much ruined your reputation. Am I right? Go on, tell me I’m wrong.”

“No,” he said
. “You’re not wrong.” From somewhere down the east wing came the sounds of a woman sobbing.

“This is gut
-check time, Bob. What happens next will be the difference between living in shame or dying with honor. What kind of man will you be?”

Robert looked up at the rope, hanging from
the rafters. Had he done that? When had he put that there?

“You’re not the first to go through this, Bob
. No sir. Not at all. My own wife tried to make a fool of me in front of my friends. In front of the whole community. While I was in prison, do you know what she did? She went and had herself the grand slam of all nervous breakdowns. And even then, I bought her the finest care money could buy. And you know how she repaid me, Bob? She went into my youngest boy’s room, where he and his brother had gone to hide from her, and she strangled them both with her bare hands. Three and five years old, my pride and joy, and she murdered them. She burned down this house, or tried to anyway, to cover it up. Killed herself in the process. Good thing too, because if the fire hadn’t killed her I sure as hell would have. Would have cracked this bat right upside her head.” Ringworm scars were spreading from under his collar, up his neck. “Like mine, your wife has put herself out of your influence. She’s made it impossible for you to do what needs to be done. At least with respect to her. But you have another option. A man always has another option, Bob.”

Robert made a fist around the rope
. It was coarse against his skin. “Yes,” he said. “I see that.”

“The world can be a cruel and absurd place, Bob
. And fortune’s a bitch. You got your ups and downs and, like any man, you handle them. You’ve done that, haven’t you? You’ve had your ups and downs, and you’ve handled them?”

“Yes,” Robert said.

“But sometimes fortune throws you a curve ball, doesn’t it? One you just can’t hit. It’s a woman, usually. Was for me, and it is for you too. They’re frail creatures, Bob, but let’s tell the truth here. They can be a little dense sometimes, can’t they? They don’t realize how much damage they do. How much heartache they cause. We put everything we have into them, making a home for them, making a family for them, loving them, and then they go and do something without thinking, something that brings it all crashing down around you.”

“That’s right.”

And it was too. Absolutely correct. Every word of it was true. He’d put everything he had into making a home for Sarah and Angela, and his love had taken her from a part-time stripper and single mother to the wife of a professor at one of the finest universities in America. He had given her this house, this enormous house. And in return, she’d hurt him. She had no idea how much she’d hurt him. That, in and of itself, was forgivable. The ignorance was. But the crime itself, the deception, the betrayal, cheating on him –fo
r
mone
y
no less! – that was too much. He had never considered suicide before, not even in an academic kind of way. But he had his dignity, his pride, and he would not have his good name dragged through the mud. Wasn’t this rope better than living with all that shame?

“Will you ever be able to look at your wife again without seeing all the ways she’s humiliated you both?” Crook said
. He handed Robert the noose. “I think this option will make it clear to everyone the kind of man you are. A man of honor.”

Hey, there goes Dr. Bob Bell
. He’s married to that porn star. Maybe, if we scrape up enough money, we can get her to...

Robert’s stomach turned over
. “But what...what will they do without...Won’t Angela need somebody to take care of her? How will Sarah take care of...” So many complicated questions, and no answers. He felt like he was going to throw up.

The doorbell rang and Robert flinched.

“What’s that? I mean, who...”

“That’s the man who started all this.”

“Who?” Robert asked.

“Jay Carroll.”

“Carroll,” Robert repeated stupidly.

“A man doesn’t get many opportunities like this, Bob
. Go down and give him a piece of your mind.” The bat was on the desk. Crook rested his hand on the fat end and curled his lip in a sort of half smile. “Go on. Show him what kind of man you are. Then come back here and show the rest of the world what kind of ma
n
yo
u
are. Take this.”

Robert glanced down at the bat in James Crook’s hand.

“Thanks.”

Crook smiled blandly at him.

Robert took the bat and felt suddenly a little dizzy, like he needed to sit down. The pain in his chest was better now, but the headache was still there. He glanced up the length of the rope, and seeing that, he felt a sort of calm wash over him. For the first time in a long time, he was sure of what needed to be done.

He imagined Jay’s head on the desk before him.

“What did you say, that’s the sweet spot right there. Right on the meat of the bat.”

Nothing.

Robert looked up. The room was empty. He still had the bat in his hand, but James Crook was gone. Only the faint smell of smoke remained behind.

The doorbell rang again
. A long blast this time.

“Coming!” Robert yelled
. He got a good grip on the bat. “Be right there.”

*

Jay Carroll backed away from the door and scanned the windows. He could see somebody moving around up there. Sarah, he guessed, from the hair.

“Hey
, what the hell?” he yelled. “I know you can hear me knocking.”

He went back to the door and beat on it with his fist.

When they still wouldn’t answer he took a step back and ran his hands through his hair as he caught his breath and tried to figure out what to do next.

“Okay,” he said
. “Okay, fine.”

Jay went around to the garage side of the house
. There was an empty door there leading on to the mud room, and beyond that, a hallway that looked like it led to some bedrooms.

Christ, this
place is big.

“Hey,” he yelled into the doorway
. “Sarah!  Robert!”

He stepped back from the doorway and looked around, to see if anybody could see him
. There were trees everywhere. He couldn’t even see the neighboring houses through the screen of oaks. And it didn’t look like there were any video cameras around here. A house like this, he would have thought there’d be cameras. A security system at least. But apparently not.

He was wearing a loose-fitting Hawaiian shirt and jeans
. The pistol was tucked into the waistband of his jeans and he gave it a pat, just to reassure himself that it was still there. He went inside.