Little Sister Death (5 page)

Along the way he had acquired an agent. Her name was Pauline Siebel and she was a large, plainspoken woman whose motherly manner belied the stubbornness beneath it, like spring steel deceptively upholstered.

Through the glass door of the telephone booth he watched the patrons of the bar going about the serious business of the day’s drinking, Pauline’s voice a reassuring buzz in his ear, businesslike. Somewhere out there in the world folks were still doing things.

Look, she told him. If you can’t write the damned thing then you can’t write the damned thing. Put it aside, work on something else. Begin another novel.

Binder smiled into the phone but the smile felt strange on his face. Right now I don’t know another novel, he said.

All right. Then don’t write one. Did you save any of the money?

Very damned little.

Then you’ll either have to go back to work or write something saleable. You’re a writer, aren’t you? You said you were. A compulsive writer? If a compulsive carpenter couldn’t build a Moorish castle he could still build a chicken coop. Even with a chicken coop there are variations in quality.

What do you mean?

Write a genre novel. Write
Shootout at Wild Horse Gulch
or
Trixie Finds Love in the Bahamas
. Write something we can sell to the paperback house. Write a horror novel. The two books I’ve seen of yours have that mood, those overtones to them anyway. The softcover racks are full of horror novels.

I don’t know if I could do that or not.

Are you saving yourself for posterity or what?

I guess I don’t know if I can do it.

Well, Pauline said, a shrug in her voice, you’re a writer. It’s your decision to make.

I’ll write you in a day or two and let you know.

By the time he got back to his beer and the ballgame, his mind was already busy thinking of a ghost story. He couldn’t focus on the ballgame. He always enjoyed reading M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft and Shirley Jackson’s
The Haunting of Hill House
was one of his favorite novels. Binder, in his youth, had always been interested in the supernatural, had felt some deep and nameless affinity for the questions that did not have any answers.

Halfdazed from the heat and from the beer he’d drunk Binder went into a used bookstore on Clark and began to browse. He bought a halfdozen books from a shelf marked O
CCULT
A
RTS AND
S
CIENCES
, selecting volumes with no criteria save their titles, choosing those with ghost or haunting or poltergeist, passing over those on astrology and spiritualism and out-of-body contact. With the paper bag of books under his arm he turned into the first bar he saw and ordered a Hamm’s, took it and the books to a back booth under the air conditioner, and studied them critically.

Not much here.
Ghosts in American Houses. Fifty Great Ghost Stories
. He hesitated on an oversized paperback, for the title stirred some memory he had lost. The book was covered with thick red paper, typescript in black, no illustration. It had been published by some house he had never heard of, one he guessed was out of business long ago, or perhaps the book had even been privately printed by a vanity press.

The Beale Haunting
by J. R. Lipscomb. J. R. Lipscomb was not given to modesty, Binder figured, for the book was subtitled:
The Authentic History of Tennessee’s Mysterious Talking Goblin, the Greatest Wonder of the Nineteenth Century
.

He opened the book and with a shock of recognition saw an ink drawing of a girl, buxom and distraught, the words beneath: V
IRGINIA
B
EALE,
F
AERY
Q
UEEN OF THE
H
AUNTED
D
ELL
.

He suddenly remembered the Beale haunting, saw immediately that fate, coincidence, and synchronicity had played into his hands. This had happened in Tennessee, two hundred miles and a hundred years from his home. He remembered an old issue of
Life
magazine from his childhood, a Halloween number with an article called “The Seven Greatest American Ghost Stories” or something of that nature. There had been two pages on the Beale haunting.

That night he read the book cover to cover, then lay sleepless thinking about it, his brain striving to postulate a solution. It grew in his mind, tolled there some evocation of familiarity until he found himself obscurely homesick for a place he had never been.

The book was amateurish and extravagantly overwritten and mawkishly sentimental in its treatment of the Beale family and their travails, but Binder was fascinated. It was a clear case of material transcending style. On the surface it was a story of a family’s relocation from North Carolina to Tennessee in the first half of the nineteenth century. It was a piece of history of the Tennessee wilderness, a story of pretty, teenaged Virginia Beale, whose wellordered life was shortly to be shattered. The tale deepened and darkened with the advent of the haunting and the ultimate descent into madness and bloody violence. Beneath the surface it seemed to Binder saturated with erotic Freudian symbolism, and he wondered if anyone had ever read the book in quite that way before.

He had to write a book about it; it seemed an unmined wealth of material. He wanted to let his mind play with the facts, rearrange them to his whims, find answers to the questions of rationality the book raised. A plan had already begun forming in his mind. He was burnt out on Chicago, had no desire to be here when the hot brassy summer changed to wind and snow.

The next day he bought an atlas of road maps. There it was. Beale Station, Tennessee, population 2,842. He could hardly believe it. The story had read like a dark fairy tale. It was like looking on a map and finding Magonia, leafing through a telephone book and finding a listing for Borley Rectory.

Beale Station, 1982

The real estate agent was named Greaves. He was a heavyset man in hornrimmed glasses and he had the professional gladhanding air of the successful businessman about him. He sat behind a desk littered with deeds and plats and advertising brochures, chainsmoking Lucky Strikes and drinking tepid coffee out of Styrofoam cups.

Yes, sir, he said. If banker Qualls told you that then he told you right. I have the only section of the Beale farm that’s available at any price.

The banker said the place had been split up quite a bit.

Oh my, yes. Originally it was over sixteen hundred acres, but that was way back in the eighteen hundreds. The only remaining section that could be called the Beale farm runs only sixty-two acres, but the house has been continually maintained and I guess you could call it the old homeplace.

The house? You mean old Jacob Beale’s house? I understood that was torn down years ago.

No, no. Well, the original log house was torn down, but Beale had another house built, a better one. He lived there until his death and then his son lived there. Of course the house has been renovated, wired and plumbed and that sort of thing. Are you interested enough to drive out and take a look at it?

That’s why I’m here.

Greaves arose. And that’s why I’m here, he said.

Outside it was blinding hot, the sun searing white off the decks of parked cars. The sky was a bright cloudless blue. Binder paused to put on sunglasses, Greaves clipping dark lenses over his spectacles.

We’ll go in the Jeep, Greaves said. The road’s not real good going in.

On the way Binder tried to find out all Greaves knew about the Beales, but the real estate agent professed to know very little at all. Or any Beales either, there being none remaining in the town that had been named for them. Greaves was handling the property for a descendant in Memphis, a great-great-granddaughter who was not even named Beale anymore.

Binder rode in silence then, watching the country slip past, the ends of cornrows clocking past like spokes in a neverending wheel, fields of heat-blighted corn segueing into dusty fencerows of sumac and honeysuckle and elderberry, all talcumed alike with thick accretions of dust from the slipstreams of passing automobiles. Here and there a tidy white farmhouse tucked well back from the road in the shade of a grove of trees, a distant tractor slowmoving and noiseless, towing a great wake of white dust.

He guessed whatever had afflicted the Beales had driven them apart and ultimately scattered them like a handful of thrown stones. He didn’t know what he had expected, or even what he had hoped for. A descendant, perhaps, who would tell him old stories heard at Daddy’s knees. Hearthside memories you couldn’t buy with gold. Old foxed papers in spidery penscrawls, journals from a pastoral corner of dementia.

The road kept branching off, steadily deteriorating until the Jeep seemed to be leaping from one raincut gully to the next, steadily ascending, the red road winding through a field promiscuous with wildflowers and goldenrod, leveling out when the cedar row began. He smelled the cedars, faintly nostalgic, the road straightening and moving between their trunks, and then in the distance he could see the house.

A great graywhite bulk looming against the greenblack of the riotous summer hills, tall and slateroofed and stately and, he thought instantly, profoundly malefic. He was suddenly of two minds about it: he wanted to flee back to Chicago and he wanted the peace he intuitively felt he could find within its walls. There was a timeless quality about it that seemed to diminish any problems he might have. In this bright moment of revelation he knew that it was less than he had expected, and incalculably more. Part log, part woodframe, part stone, it seemed to have grown at all angles like something organic turned malignant and perverse before ultimately dying, for Binder saw death in its eyes, last year’s leaves in driven windrows on the front porch, two of the second-story windows stoned blind or blown out by hunters’ guns. The house seemed mantled with an almost indefinable sense of dissolution, profoundly abandoned, unwanted, shunned.

Great God, Binder said.

Greaves glanced at him sharply. Been added on to a time or two, hasn’t it?

Once or twice, Binder agreed. Or else they kept changing their minds while it was under construction.

Greaves stopped the Jeep. Water’s down there, he said, pointing southward where beyond gray and weathered cornstalks a stream moved bright as quicksilver in the sun. That comes down from the wellhouse. Good water, he added professionally, going into his pitch. Cold as ice, it’ll ache your teeth. The spring flows out of a cave on yonder hill.

Beale Cave, Binder said automatically.

That’s right, Beale Cave. But if you buy it you can call it Binder Cave or whatever you want.

It surprises me that a house in that good a shape sat empty so long.

Say it does? Hell. I could show you a halfdozen others in a ten-minute drive. They ain’t no work around here. And the big farmers have choked the little man right out of a livin. Folks is leavin here as they get old enough to have to work, cause there damn near ain’t nothin for em to do here. Starve or git on the welfare. Get them foodstamps. And the folks that’s stayin couldn’t keep up no such place as that.

I guess that’s right.

What do you work at?

Right now I am sort of looking for work.

Greaves produced a ring of keys large as a grapefruit, selected one, unlocked the deadbolted double doors, opened them onto a foyer the size of Binder’s Chicago living room. Walls rose plumb and sheer to a dizzying height. A staircase climbed into near-dark shadows. Arched doors opened left and right, shadowy furniture crouched shapeless in shroudlike draping.

It’s furnished, Binder said in surprise.

Oh yes. The furniture goes with it. It was rented as is until two years ago. Then Mrs. Lindsay decided to sell it.

You mean people lived here as recently as two years ago?

Certainly they did. Two old ladies, sisters they was. The Misses Abernathy. What did you expect? The house is a little rundown, couple of panes of glass out, but it’s certainly sound as a dollar, and it’s been kept up. Why does it surprise you that folks lived here?

I don’t know, Binder said lamely. I thought the Beales were farmers. This doesn’t look like the sort of house a farmer would build.

The Beales were wealthy, for those times anyway. And Drewry seemed to wind up with all of it; he lived here until his death. Greaves lit a cigarette, stood for a moment cupping the dead match. Mr. Binder, you look around all you want to. I’m gonna sort of inspect the outside. See what needs painting.

All right.

Greaves turned in the doorway. You get lost just holler right loud. I’ll be where I can hear you.

Cold smell of long burntout fires, hot smell of wood baking in the sun. The dry nearmetallic drone of dirtdaubers plying their craft in the hot still air. A startled bird whirring to instantaneous life at the opening of a bedroom door, flying with blind desperation into the broken glass of a window, a tinkle of glass striking stone two stories below. He looked down. Greaves in his khakis leaning against the Jeep, his round, bored face peering bemusedly up.

He saw nothing out of the ordinary, heard nothing he could not account for. He went back downstairs into the shady yard.

He told Greaves he wanted a six-month lease. Greaves shook his head. He didn’t know about that.

My client wants a quick sale, he said. She hasn’t said a word to me about leasing.

Well, give me an option to buy, then. If she’s been wanting a quick sale for two years and you haven’t gotten it yet then I don’t see what six months would hurt. I’d think she’d be glad to lease.

Greaves looked pained, as if Binder had maligned his ability to sell real estate. Well, it’s not that I couldn’t have moved the place, Mr. Binder. It’s the times. There’s a recession on, money’s tight, and the interest rate is higher than a cat’s back.

Binder was watching him. To say nothing of the place’s unsavory reputation, he said.

Greaves took off his glasses, wiped them gently with tissue he took out of his shirt pocket. Without the glasses his blue eyes looked vulnerable and defenseless. When he put them on he looked at Binder with an expression almost of amusement. Now where did you hear that, Mr. Binder? Surely not from banker Qualls?