The Homecoming (48 page)

An entire hospital full of victims, and an elaborate facility set up on the top floor to cater to his corrupted tastes. Why would the people who ran Candleford House take that risk?

Unless it was Abel Teague’s money that created Candleford House in the first place. And kept it going. Did he pay for the staff and the guards and the quacks? Was it Teague money that got the archives burned? If Teague family money created and supported the most notorious private hell house in the Deep South, would Miles Teague kill Leah Searle and his own wife to keep
that
a secret?

Hell yes.

Reed turned to leave.

A young woman was standing in the middle of the room, glowing in the moonlight shining through the windows. She was barefoot, and wearing a dress made of very thin fabric. It looked gray in the moonlight but might have been green. She was pale but pretty, with wide eyes and long auburn hair. She was naked under the dress, her lovely body outlined by the moon’s glow. She cast no shadow on the floor in front of her. Her hands were folded together and resting on her rounded belly. She was looking at him with an odd expression that Reed realized was curiosity.

My first ghost
, was the thought in Reed’s mind. He felt no fear, only that he wanted to be very still and silent and not to do anything that would make this image flicker and disappear. The woman looked around the room, and then back at him.

“Who are you?” she asked.

Her accent was pure Savannah, her voice low and soft and clear.

“My name is Reed Walker.”

She seemed to take this in.

“Your mother is Lenore, isn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“She’s with Glynis now. She’s happy.”

“Is my father there?”

“No. I’m sorry. Nothing took him. Nothing keeps him. Nothing
keeps everything it takes. Nothing is in this place right now. Can you not feel it? You need to go.”

“Are you Clara Mercer?”

“Yes. I used to live in this place. Now I live with Glynis. Why did you come here?”

“To find out what happened here.”

She looked around the room.

“Terrible things happened here. This was Abel’s place. For a long time I lived here with him. And with nothing. They fed on me. They were one thing and no thing at the same time. They still are.”

“Why did you come here?”

She looked around the room.

“I come to remember that I am not here anymore. Sometimes I find that I cannot remember that. Glynis says that coming here helps me to remember. But I don’t stay. You should leave too.”

“You said Abel Teague is still alive?”

She shook her head.

“No. Not in the way you mean it. Not in the way you and I are alive. Glynis has him digging in her fields. He suffers there. And does no harm in the world. Sometimes I go down to the fields to watch him. But nothing is trying to get him back. Through the boy. You must see that this does not happen.”

“How will I do that?”

“Nothing is using the boy to bring Abel back. He’s already changing. You must stop that.”

“How?”

“He still has the power to turn away from that path. If he does not, you must kill him.”

She turned her head, stood very still.

“Nothing is here. I have to go. So must you.”

“Why?”

“Because nothing is thinking about you.”

And she was gone.

But the room wasn’t empty. It was as if a compressor was pumping air into the room. Reed felt the pressure building on his skin, in his lungs, in his throat. His ears ached, as if he were sinking down into deep water. The pressure was coming up from the floor and closing in from the walls.

Reed backed up to the windows and faced the room. There wasn’t a
sound. The silence was crushing. Reed couldn’t hear his own heart beating but he could feel it hammering in his chest. He had the sensation that the silence and the pressure were part of the same thing. And it was
close
now, almost touching his skin. Hovering there, an inch away from his face. And there was a
mind
in it. Cold and alien and profoundly different from Reed Walker and all of his kind.

He felt himself being
studied
.

Considered
.

Appraised
.

He knew that if he opened his mouth the silent thing would pour itself into him and stay there forever, feeding on him. He pulled out the bolt cutters, smashed the glass, and rolled backwards out the window. He fell for a long time before he crashed into the branches of a live oak, tumbled again, struck another limb, clutched at it, managed to stop, and then felt it give way, and he was dropping again, the branches lashing at him, and then the branches were gone—a moment of silent falling—he hit the grass hard, bounced once, and he was out cold.

Frankie Maranzano’s newly minted widow was now the only occupant—other than Frankie Il Secondo, the flatulent Chihuahua—of Frankie Maranzano’s 3,200-square-foot two-story penthouse suite in a sixty-four-story green glass obelisk called The Memphis. Although Frankie had retainers—mercenary muscle and gun hands—living in the building, Delores wasn’t ready to be alone with them until she had sorted out where their loyalties were likely to fall. So she was keeping them busy with the funeral arrangements for Frankie and Little Ritchie while she played the Inconsolable Widow up in the penthouse.

It wasn’t that she didn’t mourn Frankie and Ritchie. Frankie and Delores had been very happy for many years. And then they met.

Delores thought it might have been Coco Chanel who said, “If you marry for money you earn every penny.” And Frankie was doing a fine job of turning Little Ritchie into his Mini-Me, and the world did not need two Frankie Maranzanos.

Now that they were gone, her world, especially this suite, felt a lot more like home.

The Memphis was part of a cluster of towering condo complexes that had sprung up around Fountain Square, the center of the Cap City business and shopping district. It was directly across the Square from the Bucky Cullen Federal Complex, where Boonie Hackendorff, of the Cap City FBI, enjoyed a corner office with a view of Fountain Square, dominated, of course, by The Memphis. Conversely, Frankie Maranzano had a reciprocal view of the back of Boonie Hackendorff’s bald head as he sat at his desk in that corner office.

Frankie Maranzano, not an admirer of the FBI or of law enforcement in general, had often entertained his guests by aiming one of his high-powered Remington rifles at the back of Boonie’s head—the range across Fountain Square was about a thousand yards, and although a down-angle shot plagued by the tricky crosswinds that swirled around the towers, it was still quite makeable.

Although not by Frankie.

But he didn’t know that. Of course all of Frankie Maranzano’s guests would laugh wildly when Frankie would say “POW!” and pretend that the rifle had recoiled into his shoulder. They would laugh like that no matter how often he repeated it.

And he repeated it often.

Frankie Maranzano’s sense of humor was not complicated, but his business affairs had achieved a complexity that approached byzantine, and Delores, his
ex-goo-may
—actually she had ceased being his
goo-may
when he married her—was extremely awake to the precarious nature of her position.

She was sitting at Frankie’s desk—a single slab of black granite held up by two carved stone Saint Mark lions taken from a piazza in Venice. Evening had come and on the other side of the wall of glass behind her chair Cap City glowed like a constellation of diamonds and emeralds and rubies, but the glittering condos and office towers and hotels filling the skyline behind her blazed in vain upon the back of her neck, since Delores was diving deep into the problems presented by her not-quite-so-dearly-beloved Frankie’s untimely passing.

The chief problem presented by his
sudden-onset mortality experience—
this was how she had described it in an e-mail to her mother back in Guayaquil—was that Frankie’s various business associates in Denver and Vancouver and Singapore were having some difficulty accepting that a
trashy, gold-digging South American whore should, simply by the accident of being Frankie’s third wife, presume to sit in Frankie Maranzano’s chair and busy herself with matters that no mere
putana
was capable of understanding, let alone managing.

One of Frankie’s associates, phoning to express his condolences and inquire into the funeral arrangements, had ended his call by advising her to consider who among Frankie’s business partners she was going to call on to take over the Cap City end.

When Delores hinted that she might take it on herself, Tony had laughed and said, “Fuck, Delores, you’re a very fine piece of ass and I’ve always liked you, and you kept Frankie in line, fucked if I know how, but you’re not a
Guinea
piece of ass. That’s the problem. Nobody’s gonna work with a Spic whore. A
Wop
whore, sure, no problem. But a
Spic
whore? It just ain’t
dignified
. No offense, hah?”

So Delores was feeling under the gun, literally. And when a person signing himself Mr. Harvill Endicott, Private Collector and Facilitator, sent her a personal note, hand-delivered by a private courier, on expensive stationery, accompanied by a Mass card stating that Mr. Endicott had taken the liberty of paying for a novena for her late husband at Holy Name Cathedral to be said on the Sunday next, she was intrigued. The note was simple and direct:

The note had been accompanied by a return envelope and a blank reply card. Mr. Endicott had provided no hotel suite or business address or cell number. Not even an e-mail address.

Delores had read the note a couple of times, considered calling Frankie’s personal legal adviser, and then realized that Julian Porter was not now, and had never been, a friend to her, nor had he ever shown any interest in her other than the forty-seven times he had tried to get her into bed.

So she called Warren Smoles, who had been front and center at the whole Galleria Mall fiasco. Smoles seemed to be distracted—he was in a public place and he was being shouted at—nevertheless, he found time to express, in a rich baritone, his boundless regard for Mr. Endicott and all his good works.

Delores put the phone down and googled “Harvill Endicott.” The search returned nothing.

She called Warren Smoles back and advised him of this, to which he replied that of course there would be no online traces of Mr. Endicott since his services were of a confidential nature and that his nonexistence in the Google-verse was an indication of his discretion and exclusivity.

This was also why Mr. Endicott did not reveal his location or details other than in person and then only after mutual trust had been established.

Delores consulted a martini or three on the matter and decided to take a leap and see this Harvill Endicott person.

The narrative of her husband’s death, and that of Little Ritchie, was, in her opinion, crafted by the police to put Frankie in a bad light and portray him as the victim of his own volatile temper.

However, Delores, no fool, found this narrative totally persuasive—Frankie’s
crankie-wankies
were legendary in his business circles. But if there was information floating around that might undercut this interpretation, and perhaps lay the groundwork for a massive lawsuit, which she was already contemplating, then she was happy to hear it.

By return courier, she invited Mr. Endicott to call upon her in her rooms on the Pinnacle Floor of The Memphis at seven o’clock Friday evening.

In the note, she informed him that, due to the nature of her late husband’s business concerns, he would be subjected to a rigorous body search by the security personnel in the lobby, for which she apologized in advance. She had sent the note off two hours ago, and had received a reply within the hour, in which Mr. Endicott expressed his extreme pleasure at her acceptance and confirmed that he would call upon her at the appointed hour.

Which was about a minute from now.

And the phone on Frankie’s desk commenced to ring. The security detail down in the lobby had just admitted a Mr. Harvill Endicott to the elevator floor and did Miz Maranzano wish them to send this person up.

“Have you searched him?”

“Quite thoroughly, ma’am. Do you want one of us to come up and stay with you during his visit?”

The guards downstairs were neutral—they worked for whoever was paying the condo fees—but they lived for gossip to retail to the local media, and Maranzano gossip was the finest around.

“No thank you, Michael. Send him up.”

She reached over to Frankie’s iMac and turned on the video feed from the lobby. It showed a tall, well-dressed older man in a navy blue pinstripe and a white shirt. He was looking into the camera as if he were aware that he was being watched and wished to convey how harmless he was. He had a long, pale face and deep-set eyes and a general air of bookishness. He entered the elevator and, after a swift ascent, arrived on her private floor a minute later, where Delores watched as he walked across the complex tiles of her foyer and rang the bell.

Frankie had been lying on the huge white leather sectional that dominated the living room. At the sound of the bell, he erupted into a fit of hysterical yapping that reminded Delores that she was sending him to the vet in the morning to have his vocal cords clipped.