Medusa's Web (19 page)

“Let's see if Genod Speas still lives at the address she's got here,” he said.

THE ADDRESS IN THEIR
aunt's phone book for Genod Speas, east of Fairfax Avenue and just north of the 101 Freeway, proved to be a small pistachio-green stuccoed house with bars over the windows and front door, and a short, patchy front lawn. An adult-sized tricycle was locked with a cable to the post of a mailbox by the front step.

“Her brother,” said Madeline as she spun the steering wheel to drive up the two cracked concrete strips that served as a driveway.

“According to Claymation.”

They climbed out of the car and trudged up the walkway to the cement steps below the door; Scott stood on the lower one and rapped on the perforated black metal door between the bars.

“It's not my dog!” came a quavering voice from beyond the door, and Scott realized that the solid inner door was open. He tried without success to peer through the rows of tiny holes in the metal sheet.

“I'm not here about a dog,” said Scott loudly. He looked back at Madeline and spread his hands.

“Message from Amity,” she prompted in a whisper.

“It's about Amity Speas,” called Scott. “Or Madden.”

He heard creaking and squeaking from inside, and after several seconds the metal door was pulled open, and between the bars Scott
saw a sagging, wrinkled face below wispy white hair appear out of the interior shadows.

“You brought my check?” said the old man, blinking up at Scott. “It's more than a week late. They think it's my dog, but it's not. I don't have a dog.”

“I'll tell them. Can we come in? I'm Scott Madden, and this is my sister, Madeline. Amity Speas was our aunt. You're Genod Speas?”

“Yes, I—” Speas clenched his eyes shut, then said hollowly, “Was?”

“I'm sorry,” said Madeline. “She . . . passed on, last Wednesday.”

The face contorted in a hundred new wrinkles, but the old man lifted one spotted hand from the grip of a walker and turned the interior knob on the barred gate. Scott pulled it open.

Speas, in worn purple flannel pajamas and barefoot, tugged his walker back across scattered newspapers that rattled under its wheels. The walker had a seat attached to it, and he sagged down onto it and laid his head on the crossbar between the grips. His scalp was clearly visible under his scanty white hair.

Madeline gave Scott an anxious look.

“You're her older brother?” she said.

Speas raised his head. “I have no older brother,” he said brokenly. “How could she die? I'm not—but I need my check.”

Scott looked around the room. Age-darkened curtains hung over two windows flanking the door, and the outside bars cast vertical shadows on the fabric. Folded brown paper shopping bags were stacked on a blue vinyl couch against one wall, and an old television set with rabbit-ear antennas stood on a painted table against the opposite wall. It wasn't turned on, and Scott was pretty sure it couldn't work. The air was warm and stale, with a whiff of corn tortillas.

“She's dead?” said Speas. “You're certain?”

Madeline nodded at him, wide-eyed. “I'm sorry,” she said.

The old man stared at her and then swiveled his head to peer at Scott. “You live at Caveat?”

“For the moment,” said Scott.

“She would never let me live there. She paid me to stay here. I don't even
have
a dog!”

“She was your sister?” asked Madeline.

“No,” said the old man, suddenly angry. “Is that the story? She was my
mother
.”

Scott looked up and met Madeline's glance and shook his head slightly.

But Speas saw the look. “
I've
got a birth certificate,” he said querulously, “a
real
one, if you don't believe me.” He blinked around the narrow room as if hoping to see it.

“When were you born?” asked Scott.

“Nineteen twenty-three,” said Speas, apparently proud of remembering it, “and she was twenty-four years old.”

“We saw a picture of her that was taken before 1926,” said Madeline.

“She was an actress,” said Speas, his voice catching. “She got work in every scene—because she was too smart to ever let the camera see her face close up! You can't have a, a French peasant girl in a crowd recognizably show up later as a lady in King Louis's court!” He glared at Scott and Madeline as if they had suggested that one could. “Pro—
professional
. She always wore yellow, because that looked white on film. You know what actual white would do?”

Scott shook his head.

“It would flare so bright on the screen that people's faces looked like mud. But she lost her career, changed her name, lost it all, the year before I was born.”

“What happened?” asked Madeline.

“Somebody
shot
her, in the foot. With a gun. It never healed straight. I worked in the movie business myself, later.” He peered around again at the shabby living room as if wondering what his original topic had been. “Ava Gardner and I . . . meant something to each other, at one time.” He looked up at Madeline. “You'll get me my check, won't you?”

“I'll see that they get it to you,” she said. “Quick.”

“Who was your father?” asked Scott.

Speas covered his face in his wrinkled hands. “She would never say his name. I think he was the devil.”

“What was
her
name,” Scott went on, “before she changed it?”

“She made me promise never to tell. I never have.”

“But now that she's—” began Scott, but Madeline interrupted him with a wave.

“When did you last see her?” she asked.

“I haven't seen her since . . . right after
Night of the Iguana
came out. She never let me go to Caveat. I think she married again and had another son. I never could read her books.”

Over the old man's head, Scott mouthed at Madeline,
We need to know her name
.

Madeline shook her head impatiently, and her lips clearly formed the words,
We know it
.

“Ava Gardner was in
Night of the Iguana,
” said Speas softly, perhaps talking to himself now. “She and I . . .” He nodded. “I'm sure she remembers.”

Scott was pretty sure Ava Gardner was dead.

SCOTT WAS SMOKING ANOTHER
cigarette, his right arm out the car window, as Madeline drove up Fairfax past watch-repair shops and vintage clothing stores, and finally Madeline spoke.

“Aunt Amity was a hundred and sixteen years old when she died. Not seventy-one, like everybody thinks.”

Scott blew smoke out the window. “Ostriker and Speas, both, made me think of a forged birth certificate.” He laughed. “It makes sense, sort of, but I really don't actually
believe
it.”

“I do,” said Madeline, keeping her eyes on the traffic ahead but nodding emphatically. “Her last-person novel is all
Charlene
talking to that detective from her books. Not
Amity
. Charlene
stole the exorcism film from Natacha and got shot in the foot doing it.”

“Aunt Amity always did limp,” Scott admitted.

“I don't,” said Madeline. “I wonder if that's why she wants to possess me.”

“I'm sure that's it.”

Madeline sighed. “You're making fun of me.”

“Sorry.”

“The 1899 birth certificate was her real one; her real name is Charlene Cooper. Was. The 1944 one, and the Amity Speas name, were fakes. She got so old that she had to pretend that she was her own made-up daughter.”

Scott took a long draw on the cigarette. “When you lay it all out that way, it sounds—insane.”

“Think about it.”

He caught himself thinking instead of how the sun had lit Louise's hair this morning, and even of what brush he would use to capture it in paint on canvas, and he forced the unwelcome thought away. “We'll want to look at those photocopies again,” he said.

THE BOOM ON THE
roof and the grinding crackle in Ariel's bedroom wall were simultaneous, and her first panicky thought was that her aunt's suicide reruns were going to knock the house down. But when she glanced at the wall, she quickly looked away, her heart pounding. She had peripherally glimpsed eight cracks radiating from a central point at about eye level, and for several seconds she just stood in the middle of the floor, trembling, breathlessly wondering if she had seen it clearly enough to be tipped into a spider vision.

After twenty heartbeats, it was clear that she had not. She was simply looking out the window at the sunlit houses on the slope across Vista Del Mar.

But I
could
look at it, she told herself, relaxing. It's clean, it just happened, obviously nobody has looked at it before; and I can . . . afterward I can get a hammer and knock all the plaster off the wall with my eyes closed, so I won't look at it again, it won't have an after for me or anybody else. It's not like I'm relapsing, I can't help it, I didn't go looking for it, the damn thing just appeared in the wall! And the spiders are going to stop working soon anyway!—at least according to that strange little man in front of the spiderbit shop.

She half turned toward the cracked wall, then stopped. Scott is
staying away from liquor, she thought. I have at least as much willpower as he has. And he'd be able to tell, if I look at it now—at dinner I'd be all stiff and bleary and spider lagged. He'd know.

She stepped across the rag rug to her dresser and pulled open the top drawer, reaching for the bull's-eye glasses she had left there; and so her hand partly blocked her view of the slip of paper that lay in the front of the drawer, but she saw the diverging ends of the ink lines.

“Fuck!” She looked straight at the floor as she clutched and crumpled the paper, then groped blindly around in the drawer—but the glasses were gone.

With her eyes nearly closed, so that she was peering blurrily through her eyelashes, she shuffled out of her room, then hurried wide-eyed down the hall to the next bedroom door. She turned the knob and yanked the door open.

Claimayne was sitting up in his ornate bed, hunched over the bedside table, and his pale, surprised face was turned toward her. On the table were a dozen glittering strips of foil and a gun she hadn't seen before—it was a revolver, but it looked bulkier than the one she'd taken from him yesterday and pitched into a bush by the driveway.

She burst out, “On Tuesday night when I asked you for one, you told me not to do a spider, and now you leave one in my drawer? Did you hope to still have enough volition left to let you
walk around
in me?” She took a deep breath. “You miserable shit,” she added.

He was blinking at her with his mouth open.

“My God,” she said more quietly, “you
did
want to switch with me!”

His mouth snapped shut. “There was—are you saying there was a spider in your drawer?” The lamplight glittered on tiny drops of sweat on his forehead.

She looked at the stainless-steel revolver and shivered. “What were you going to do, in my body, if your trick worked? Or did you just want to rejuvenate your creepy old blood one more time, with
mine? And why the gun?” She strode to the bedside table and picked up one of the glittering strips. “What are these, gum wrappers?”

Claimayne visibly pulled himself together. “You found my spider,” he said with a fluttering smile. “I was wondering where I left it. I was carrying it around, and snooping, and I must have accidentally left it in your drawer.” He frowned and nodded. “I'm sorry—you know I don't approve of you using them.”

“Then what's become of my bull's-eye glasses?”

After an expressionless pause, Claimayne said, “I wouldn't know. But you can get more, can't you?—from your . . .
allies
.”

Ariel let go of the foil strip and gave him a puzzled frown. “Is it because I went there? To the spiderbit shop?”

Claimayne pulled open the drawer in the bedside table and lifted the revolver and laid it in the drawer, then carefully swept the foil strips in after it.

He slid the drawer shut and folded his hands. “I don't have time to answer all your idiotic questions.”

“
Allies?
Do you think the spiderbits asked me to spy on you? Damn it, tell me what you were going to—”

“Please leave my room. Be grateful I don't tell you to leave this house. I'm the owner now.”

A line of bright blood abruptly ran down from one nostril to his lips. He licked it away, but made no attempt to block the flow, and a moment later the line ran down his chin and drops of blood were falling metronomically onto his embroidered dressing gown.

“See what you've done,” he said.

Ariel opened her mouth to say something further, then just turned and hurried out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

SCOTT HEARD A DOOR
slam, and then footsteps hurrying in the hall and knocking away down the stairs. Madeline was with him in their parents' room, so he knew it must have been Ariel.

“I don't think we've brought peace to this house,” said Madeline, sitting on the water-stained mattress and holding the Valentino biography. Their parents' telephone sat on a shelf beside the door, yards from the short wires that stuck out of the wall; Scott had said that if it worked at all, it would probably work better unconnected.

“I don't think Aunt Amity meant us to,” Scott said. “I'll fetch those papers.”

Scott walked through Madeline's room to his own, and he stepped around the bed and lifted the mattress; then his face was suddenly cold and he lifted the mattress higher and peered around at the shadowed surface of the box springs.

The manila envelope was not there, though he could see the pint bottle of Wild Turkey lying faceup, glittering even in the dimness. After a few more seconds of useless scrutiny, he dropped the mattress and got down on his hands and knees to look under the bed and around at the floor. But the envelope was nowhere to be seen.

It had been under the mattress this morning when he had pushed the abused Wild Turkey bottle in beside it.

He walked back through the two doorways to their parents' bare room. “Let's take a walk in the garden,” he said.

“Didn't you want to look—”

“I can look for my cigarettes later,” he said, winking at her.

“Oh.” She stood up uncertainly. “Okay.”

The two of them hurried out of the room and down the hall past Ariel's and Claimayne's rooms, and as they passed the wall of doors, Scott was tempted to knock on the one from the Garden of Allah—
when is a door not adore,
he thought; and he remembered Madeline's guess that the answer was,
when it's a way in, Scott
—but Madeline was already clattering down the wooden stairs, and he lengthened his stride to catch up.

On the ground floor they could hear banging from down the hall in the direction of their aunt's library, but Scott shook his head and
pointed at the shorter hall that led to the laundry room and a back door.

When they had walked outside, the cold breeze blew the door shut behind them. Scott led his sister along one of the gravel paths up the slope, and he halted a dozen yards short of the Medusa wall.

Madeline said, “You think Claimayne's got microphones in our rooms?”

“The envelope's gone,” he said. “It was under my mattress.”

Madeline glanced ahead toward the Medusa mosaic and then up at the sky, where clouds were shifting in from the east. “I wouldn't have thought Claimayne could
lift
a mattress. Maybe it was Ariel.”

Scott felt his face getting hot at the thought that Ariel might have seen the pint bottle of bourbon under his mattress.

He shook his head, angry at himself. “I don't know why anyone would want those papers—even if they are evidence that Aunt Amity was a hundred-something years old.” He rubbed one hand over his face. “What do you remember from them?”

“There were two birth certificates—one for Charlene Claimayne Cooper, born in 1899. That has to be Aunt Amity's real one, and her real name, even though she wrote ‘Mother' on it. Then there was another one for Amity Imogene Speas, saying she was born in 1944. I'm sure that's a forgery; you remember Genod insisted that
his
birth certificate was ‘a
real
one.' And there was a marriage license, Paul David Speas and Charlene Claimayne Cooper, from 1921.” She glanced nervously back at the house. They couldn't be overheard, but she leaned closer to whisper, “And there was a copy of the little envelope the
Oneida Inc
spider was in.”

Scott shivered in the wind. “That's right. Somebody might get the idea that we have it.”

“Her retirement check. We ripped it up—but maybe somebody else wants to retire with it. The people Louise is working for, or the guy at Ross in the . . . what was it?”

“Chevy Blazer. Unless Louise was making him up for effect.”

Scott heard the kitchen door squeak open, and then footsteps on the cement walkway; and a moment later Ariel stepped around the corner into the sunlight and scowled at them. She looked over her shoulder, then came striding toward them past the tall aluminum ladder that still leaned against the roof. Her flat shoes crunched on the gravel of the path, and she halted a few feet short of where Scott and Madeline stood and took a deep breath.

“Did you take an envelope from under Scott's mattress?” asked Madeline before Ariel could speak.

Ariel blinked and exhaled. “What? I was just in my aunt's library! Scott doesn't sleep there! Are you crazy?”

Scott cocked an eyebrow. He was relieved that she apparently didn't know what Madeline was talking about—but Ariel nevertheless sounded defensive, and he guessed that she had in fact taken something from the library. She had certainly been making enough noise in there when he and Madeline had come downstairs.

“And nothing in that library is any of
your
business anyway,” Ariel went on, visibly regaining confidence, “and I wouldn't have to do
any
of this if you two hadn't come back here! You two are wrecking Caveat! Cracks in the walls—old cars in the driveway—!”

“What is it you have to do?” asked Scott.

Ariel glanced over her shoulder toward the driveway—anxiously, Scott thought. She started to speak, then shook her head. “Nothing you'd want to know about,” she said finally. “If I had any sense, I wouldn't even come back here. I might not anyway.”

She turned and stalked back down the path and around the corner; and he heard her car door click open and then clunk shut.

Madeline gave Scott an urgent look, and he nodded. “No time for the car,” he said, slapping his jeans to be sure he had his keys. “That sounded almost suicidal, didn't it?”

She nodded rapidly. “Helmet?”

He shook his head and hurried back down the path and along the walkway to the kitchen corner, and he waited until he heard
Ariel's Kia shift from reverse into drive, and move away down the bottom half of the driveway, before he stepped out and sprinted to his motorcycle.

It started at the first kick, and he let it coast down the driveway idling quietly in neutral as he squeezed the front-wheel brake lever to stay well back, because the back-wheel brake squeaked in damp weather.