10. Rattlesnakes .5

“I wouldn’t test that if I were you. Just a friendly piece of advice.”

I heard it then, faint but audible: Squeak and squeak and squeak.

I told myself I didn’t. Told myself it was ridiculous. Told myself I wasn’t in a story called “The Tell-Tale Pram.”

“Again, Mr. Pelley… Deputy Pelley… what’s this about? You’re acting like the woman was murdered and I’m a suspect.”

Pelley was unperturbed. “Autopsy will most likely tell us how she died. Most likely that’ll let you off the hook.”

“I had no idea I was on one.”

“As for what this is about—complicating matters, you could say—there’s this. Found it on the kitchen table when I went in her house this morning at six o’clock.”

He fiddled with his phone, then passed it over. He had taken a picture of a white business envelope. On it in neat cursive was To Be Opened In Event Of My Death and Alita Marie Bell.

“The envelope wasn’t sealed, so I went ahead and opened it. Swipe to the next photo.”

I did. The note that had been in the envelope was written in the same neat cursive. And the date at the top—

“This is the day after we had the milk and cookies!”

The squeaks were coming from below, in the garage. And as with the police in the Poe story, Pelley didn’t seem to hear them. But he was an old guy, and maybe on the deaf side.

“Was it, now?”

“Yes, and some nice conversation.” I wasn’t going to tell him that Allie had sent Jake and Joe into Greg’s study to play, and I’d later found the wicker basket of cat toys overturned. That was the last thing I was going to tell this sharp-eyed (but possibly dull-eared) man. Nor would I tell him that I had conversed, more or less, with the twins myself. Hello, Jake. Hello, Joe, what do you know?

It had been a harmless nod to an old lady’s wistful fantasy. So I’d thought, but who knows when you open the door to a haunting? Or how?

“Go on and read the rest.”

I did. It was brief and informal.

This is my last will and testament, revoking all previous wills. Which is silly, because in my case there are no others. I am sound of mind if a little less so in body. I leave this house, my bank account at First Sun Trust, my investment account with Building the Future LLC, and all other worldly possessions to VICTOR TRENTON, currently living at 1567 Rattlesnake Road. My lawyer, who I didn’t consult when I wrote this, is Nathan Rutherford in Palm Village.

Signed,

Alita Marie Bell

There was another signature below it, in a different hand: Roberto M. Garcia, Witness.

I forgot about the squeaking from the garage (or maybe it stopped). I read her death-letter—nothing else to call it—over again. A third time. Then I slid Pelley’s phone back across the table, a little harder than I had to. He blocked it like a hockey puck with one tanned and wrinkled hand.

“That’s crazy.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

“I only met her twice. Three times, if you count finding her dead.”

“No idea why she’d leave you everything?”

“No. And hey, that… that note… will never stand up in court. I’d say her relatives would go nuclear, but they won’t have to because I won’t contest it.”

“Roberto Garcia owns Plant World. They did her groundskeeping.”

“Yes, I’ve seen their trucks in her driveway.”

“Bobby G has also been around here for donkey’s years. If he says he saw her write that—and I have spoken to him and he says yeah, he did, although she held her hand over it when he signed so he didn’t know what was in it—then I gotta believe it.”

“Doesn’t change anything.” My words came out okay, but my whole face felt numb, as if I’d been shot up with Novocain. The oddest thing. “This lawyer will get in touch with her relatives, and—”

“I also talked to Nate Rutherford. Known him—”

“Donkey’s years, I’m sure. You’ve been busy, Deputy Pelley.”

“I get around,” he said, and not without satisfaction. “He’s been Mrs. Bell’s lawyer for…” He seemed to consider donkey’s years and decided it should be put to bed. “… for decades. He pretty much took over her affairs after Mrs. Bell’s husband and boys died. She was what they call prostrate with grief. And you know what? He says she doesn’t have any relatives.”

“Everybody has relatives. Donna—my late wife—claimed that her family went back to Mary Stuart, also known as Mary, Queen of—”

“Queen of Scots, I did go to school once upon a time, Mr. Trenton, back when all the phones had dials and cars came without seatbelts. I asked Nate how much the lady’s estate might total up to and he declined to say. But considering the property—bay to Gulf, very fine—I’d guess quite a tasty chunk of change.”

I got up, rinsed my coffee cup, and filled it with water. Giving myself time to think. Also listening for the stroller, but that was quiet.

I came back to the table and sat down. “Are you seriously suggesting that I somehow coerced the lady into writing a jackleg will… and then… what? Killed her?”

The eyes, boring into mine. “I think you just suggested that, Mr. Trenton. But since you have… did you?”

“Good Christ, no! I talked to her twice! I indulged her little fantasy! Then I found her dead! Of a heart attack, most likely—she told me she had arrhythmia.”

“No, I don’t really believe that, which is why I’m not here asking you to make an official statement. But you see the position it puts me—the department—in, don’t you? Lady makes out what they call a holograph will just before she dies, gets it witnessed up, and the man—the stranger—who finds her body also turns out to be the benny-fishie.”

“She must have been crazy about more than just her kids,” I muttered, and found myself thinking about that song Officer Zane had mentioned—“Delta Dawn.”

“Maybe sí, maybe no. In any case the autopsy’s probably going on as we speak. That’ll tell us something. And you’ll have to testify at the inquest, of course. That will be official.”

My heart sank. “When?”

“Maybe not for a couple of weeks. It’ll be by one of those computer video links. FaceTime, Zoom, I dunno. I can barely use this fancy phone.”

I didn’t believe that for a minute.

“In any case, it’d be good if you stuck around, Vic.” Now my first name felt like a trap. “In fact, I have to insist. The way things are, with the Covid running wild, it would probably be safest for you to stay right here, buttoned up and masked in town. Don’t you think?”

That might have been when I began to realize what Alita Bell had done, although it wouldn’t coalesce until that evening.

Or maybe it hadn’t been her. I thought of Donna on that last night. How she’d looked past me, her dying eyes growing bright one last time. Oh my God, she’d said. You’re all grown up!

Children couldn’t plot and plan. Adults, on the other hand…

“Vic?”

“Hmm?”

The smile lines at the corners of his eyes crinkled. “Kind of thought I’d lost you for a minute.”

“No, I’m here. Just… processing.”

“Yeah, it’s a lot to process, isn’t it? For me, too. Like one of those mystery novels. I think you better stick to your original plan. Stay until September. Take your walks in the morning or in the cool of the evening. Have a swim in the pool. We need to figure this out if we can.”

“I’ll think about it.”

The smile lines disappeared. “Think hard, and while you’re thinking, stay in-county.” He rose and hitched at the belt of his shorts. “And now I think I’ve taken up enough of your time.”

“I’ll see you out.”

“No need, I can find my way.”

“I’ll see you out,” I repeated, and he raised his hands as if to say have it your way.

We went down the stairs to the garage. He paused partway and asked, with just the right combination of curiosity and sympathy, “How did your wife die, Vic?”

It was a normal enough question, no reason to believe he wanted to find out if there had been anything suspicious about it, but I had an idea that was in his mind. And not just in the back of it, either.

“Cancer,” I said.

He went the rest of the way down the stairs. “Very sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you. Will you be taking the stroller back to the Bell house? You could put it in the back of your truck.” I wanted to be rid of it.

“Well, yes,” he allowed, “I could. But what would be the point? It might just come back again, if this… prankster… is determined to have his little joke at your expense. We send a cruiser up Rattlesnake Road once or twice a night, but that still leaves a lot of dead time. And there are some officers down with Covid. Might be just as easy to leave it here.”

He doesn’t think there’s any prankster, I thought. He thinks it was me. Both times. He doesn’t know why, but that’s what he believes.

“What about fingerprints?”

He scratched the back of his seamed and deeply tanned neck. “Yeah, could do, I’ve got a fingerprint kit in my truck, but that would mean taking transfers of any prints I made, and I might mess it up. Hands aren’t as steady as they used to be.”

I hadn’t noticed that and didn’t now.

He brightened. “You know what? I can at least dust those chrome bars and take some pictures with my phone if I find anything. No point trying the handgrips, they’re rubber, and those little arms beside the seats are fabric. But those metal push-bars are, yeah, ideal for prints. Did Zane or Canavan touch it?”

“I’m not sure, but I think just me. And Allie Bell, of course.”

He nodded. At this point we were still at the foot of the stairs. We hadn’t gone out into the garage yet.

“So I could find two sets of prints—yours and Mrs. Bell’s. Although unlikely. Most people would just use the rubber handgrips.”

“I think I reached down and tilted the stroller up to get it over the doorjamb and into her garage. If I did, I could have wrapped my hands on those rods just below the grips. You might not find fingerprints, but there would be palmprints.”

He nodded, and we went into Greg’s garage. He headed outside to get his fingerprint kit, but I took his elbow to stop him. “Look,” I said, and pointed at the stroller.

“What about it?”

“It’s been moved. When I brought it in from the courtyard, I put it next to the driver’s side of my car. Now it’s on the passenger side.”

So I had heard the squeaking.

“Can’t remember for sure.”

His frown—the vertical line between his brows so deep I couldn’t see the bottom—told me he did remember but didn’t want to believe it.

“Come on, Andy.” I used his given name deliberately, an old ad conference trick I employed when arguments got heated. I wanted us to be in this together, if possible. “You’ve been a police officer long enough for observation to be a habit. That stroller was in the shade. Now it’s on the other side of my car and in the sun.”

He thought about it and shook his head. “Couldn’t say for sure.”

I wanted to make him admit it, wanted to tell him I’d heard that squeaky wheel when the pram had been moved even if he hadn’t, wanted to shake the arm I was holding. Instead I let it go. It was hard, but I did it. Because I didn’t want him to think I was crazy… and if he thought I was the one moving the stroller at night between the Bell house and Greg’s, he was already halfway to drawing that conclusion. And there was Allie Bell’s weird holograph will for him to think about, too. Did he really believe Allie and I were bare acquaintances who had only met twice? Would I have believed it?

I had an idea the questions were just beginning for me.

“I’ll get my little kit,” Pelley said. “Although I’m not hopeful.”

He drove off in his pickup ten or fifteen minutes later, after reminding me again not to leave the county, saying it would be a real bad idea. He told me that he or one of the full-time county detectives would be in touch after the autopsy.

That was a long day. I tried to nap and couldn’t. On several occasions I thought I heard the squeaky wheel and went down to the garage. The stroller hadn’t moved. I wasn’t surprised. I had heard it when Pelley was sitting at my kitchen table; that was real. Later on it was something else. Imagination, you would say, but it wasn’t. Not exactly. I thought it was a form of teasing. You can believe that or not, but I felt sure of it.

No; I knew.

Once when I heard that squeaking (not real, but real in my head) and I went down to the garage, I thought I saw the shadows of snakes on the wall. I closed my eyes tight, then opened them. The shadows were gone. They hadn’t been there, but they had been. Now there was only the stroller, sitting in the sunlight on the cement garage floor and casting its sane shadow.

Around noon, as I was eating a chicken salad sandwich, I thought of oiling that squeaky wheel after all—there was 3-In-One on the worktable in the second garage bay—and decided against it. I didn’t like the idea of touching the stroller, but I could have; I wasn’t hysterical or phobic about it. Only I remembered the old Aesop’s fable about the mice that belled the cat. Why did they do that? Because they wanted to be able to hear it coming.

I felt the same about the stroller. Especially after Pelley dusted the chrome rods and found nothing—not even the random smudges and bits of dust he would have expected. “I think it’s been wiped. By your prankster.”

Looking right at me when he said it.

That evening I walked the length of Rattlesnake Key to the swing bridge. A long walk for an old man, but I had a lot to think about. I started by asking myself again if I was crazy. The answer was an emphatic no. The snakes in the tub and the waving hand could have been a stress-induced hallucination (I didn’t believe it, but granted the possibility). The stroller in the bathroom, on the other hand, had been there. I’d only seen its shadow, but the sound of the squeaky wheel had been unmistakable. And when it was in the garage, it had moved. I’d heard it. I didn’t think Pelley had, but he knew it was in a different place, although he didn’t want to admit it to me (or probably to himself).

The swing bridge was a 24/7 deal. That night it was being manned by Jim Morrison (“Not of the Doors,” he always liked to say), a guy who was probably older than either Pelley or me. We talked for awhile when I got there—the weather, the upcoming election, how Covid had emptied the baseball stadiums except for cardboard cutouts of make-believe people. Then I asked him about Mrs. Bell.

“You found her, right?” Jim said. We were outside his little booth, where he had a television, a beat-up easy chair, and a toilet cubicle. He was wearing his yellow high-visibility vest and his red cap with RATTLESNAKE KEY on the visor. A toothpick jutted from one corner of his seamed mouth.

“Yes.”

“Poor lady. Poor old soul. She never got over losing those boys of hers. Pushed that stroller everywhere.”

Which was a perfect lead-in for what I really wanted to ask. “Do you think she really believed the boys were in it?”

He scratched his stubbly chin as he thought it over. “Can’t say for sure, but I think she did, at least some of the time. Maybe even most of the time. I think she made herself believe it. Which is a dangerous thing, in my opinion.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Better to accept the dead, wear the scar, and move on.”

I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t.

“Were you in on the big snake hunt after they died? Andy Pelley told me about it.”

“Oh yeah, I was there. To this day I can smell those rattlers as they burned. And do you know what? Sometimes I think I see em, especially around this time of day.” He leaned over the rail and spit his toothpick into the Gulf of Mexico. “Dusk, you know. Real things seem thinner then, at least to me. My wife used to say I shoulda been a poet, with ideas like that. After the stars come out, I’m okay. I’ll see plenty tonight. I’m on until twelve, then Patricia takes over.”

“I wouldn’t think you’d get many boats wanting to go through at this time of the year, especially at night.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised. Lookit there.” He pointed to the moon, which was just coming up and beating silver across the water. “Folks like a moonlight cruise. Makes em romantic. Dark of the moon’s different, at least in summer. Then it’s mostly Coast Guard boats. Or DEA. Those boys are always in a hurry. Like blaring their horns could make this old bridge open any faster.”

We talked a little more and then I said I’d better be heading back.

“Yes,” Jim said. “Long walk for a man getting on in years. But you’ll have the moon to light your way.”

I told him good evening and started back across the bridge.

“Vic?”

I turned back. He was leaning against his little booth, arms folded across his vest. “Two weeks after my wife died, I came down in the middle of the night for a glass of water and saw her sitting at the kitchen table, wearing her favorite nightgown. The kitchen light wasn’t on, and the room was shadowy, but it was her, all right. I’d swear to it before God Almighty. Then I turned on the light, and…” He raised one loosely fisted hand and opened the fingers. “Gone.”

“I heard my son after he died.” It seemed perfectly right to give that up after what Jim had told me. “Speaking from the closet. And I’d swear to that.”

He only nodded, wished me goodnight, and went back into his booth.

For the first mile of my walk home, maybe a little more, there were plenty of houses, first those of ordinary size but getting bigger and fancier as I went. There were lights in a few of them with cars parked in the shell driveways, but most of the houses were dark. Their owners would come back after Christmas and leave before Easter. Depending on the pandemic situation, of course.

Once I passed the swing gate at the north end of the Key, the few McMansions on this part of the island were hidden behind the rhododendrons and palmettos that closed in on both sides of the road. The only sounds were the crickets, the waves breaking on the Gulfside beach, a whippoorwill, and my own footfalls. By the time I reached the yellow police tape closing off Mrs. Bell’s driveway, it was almost full dark. That three-quarter moon had risen enough to light my way, but it was still mostly blocked by the foliage that grows in Florida’s hothouse climate.

As soon as I passed Allie’s driveway, the squeaking started. It was thirty or forty feet behind me. My skin broke out in bumps. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I stopped, unable to walk, let alone run (not that with my creaky hips I could have run far, anyway). I understood what was happening. They had been waiting for me in their driveway. Waiting for me to pass so they could follow me back to Greg’s. What I remember most about that first moment is how my eyes felt. Like they were swelling in their sockets. I remember thinking that if they popped I’d be blind.

The squeaking stopped.

Now I could hear another sound: my own heartbeat. Like a muffled drum. The whippoorwill had fallen silent. So had the crickets. A drop of cold sweat trickled slowly down from the hollow of my temple to the angle of my jaw. I took a step. It was hard. Then another. A little easier. A third, easier still. I began to walk again, but it was as if I were on stilts. I had gotten perhaps fifty feet closer to Greg’s house when the squeaking started again. I stopped and the squeaking stopped. I started forward on my invisible stilts and the squeaking started. It was the stroller. The twins pushing the stroller. They started when I started and stopped when I stopped. They were grinning, I was sure of it. Because it was a fine joke on their new… new what? What, exactly, was I to them?

I was afraid I knew. Allie Bell had left me her house, money, and investments. But that wasn’t all she had left me. Was it?

“Boys,” I said. My voice was not my own. I was still facing forward and my voice was not my own. “Boys, go home. It’s past your bedtime.”

Nothing. I waited for cold hands to touch me. Or to see dozens of snakes weaving their way across the moonlit road. The snakes would be cold, too. Until they bit, that was. Once the poison was injected, the heat would begin. Spreading toward my heart.

No snakes. The snakes are gone. You could see them but they wouldn’t be real.

I walked. The stroller followed. Squeak and squeak and squeak.

I stopped. The stroller stopped. I was close to Greg’s house now, I could see the bulk of it against the sky, but that was no relief. They could come in. They had come in.

See us. See us. See us.

Roll us. Roll us. Roll us.

Dress us. Dress us. Dress us.

The thoughts were maddening, like one of those earworm songs that gets in your head and won’t leave. “Delta Dawn,” for instance. But I could stop them. I knew what would make them go away, at least temporarily.

They also knew.

See us. Roll us. Dress us.

I didn’t dare turn around, but there was something I could do. If I dared. My phone was in the pocket of my shorts. I took it out, opened the camera app, and reversed the image so I was looking at my own terrified face, corpse-pale in the moonlight. I raised the phone over my shoulder so I could look behind me without actually turning my head. I tried to steady my hand. Hadn’t realized it was shaking until then.

Jacob and Joseph weren’t there and neither was the stroller… but their shadows were there. Two human shapes and the angular one of the double buggy their mother had pushed them around in. I can’t say those disembodied shadows were worse than actually seeing them would have been, but they were terrible enough. I pushed the button to take a photograph with my thumb, sure it wouldn’t work, but I heard the click.

See us. Roll us. Push us.

I closed the photo app and opened the voice memo.

See us, roll us, push us.

I thought those shadows were too long to be the shadows of four-year-old children and thought again of Donna at the end of her life: You’re all grown up! Look how tall you are!

SEE US ROLL US PUSH US!

I started walking again. The squeaking followed me, close at first, then gradually falling behind. By the time I reached Greg’s house it was gone, but the clamoring thoughts—not voices, thoughts—in my head were louder than ever. They were my thoughts, but I was being forced to think them.

The stroller was back in the courtyard. Of course it was, and casting the same angular shadow I’d seen on my phone. The shirts were still neatly draped over the seats; HECKLE on one and JEKYLL on the other. I knew how to quiet the storm in my head. I touched the backs of the seats. I touched the shirts. The clamoring, repetitive thoughts died. I pushed the stroller back into the garage, then stepped away from it, waiting. The thoughts didn’t return. But they would, of course. Next time they would be louder and more insistent. Next time they would want more than my touch.

Next time they’d want to go for a ride.

I locked the doors—as if that would do any good—and turned on every light in the house. Then I sat at the kitchen table and looked at my phone. I had a missed call from Nathan Rutherford, but I had more pressing business than Allie Bell’s lawyer. I looked at the picture I’d taken. It was a little blurred because my hand had never stopped shaking, but the shadows of the boys and the pram were there. Nothing was casting them. The road was empty. Next I opened the voice memo app and pushed play. For twenty seconds I heard the rhythmic squeaking of the pram’s bad wheel. Then it faded away.

I thought about getting in touch with Andy Pelley, because I was sure he’d registered the different position of the stroller when our talk was over. He’d given me his card. I could email him the photo and the voice memo, but he’d reject both. He’d say the shadows were of the palmettos. He might know better, but that’s what he would say. And the squeaky wheel? He’d think I did that myself, running the stroller back and forth in the garage while I recorded. He might not say so, but he would think so. He was a cop, not a ghost hunter.

But maybe that was okay. I had empiric proof for myself. I had already known what was happening was real, but the thought that it was all in my head had lingered in the background, even so.

I sat at the kitchen table with my palms pressed against my forehead, thinking. Just a few missed beats of the old ticker, Allie had said when I asked if she was okay, but suppose she had been a lot sicker than she claimed? And knew it? Suppose it wasn’t just arrhythmia but congestive heart failure? Even cancer, one of those like glioblastoma that’s a death warrant.

Suppose she was resigned to her own death but not to the deaths of her little boys? They had already died once, after all, but had come back. Or she had brought them back. And then…

“Suppose she met me,” I said.

Yes, suppose.

I called Nathan Rutherford, introduced myself, and immediately cut to the chase: I had no interest in Allie Bell’s estate.

I think his chuckle was more cynical than surprised. “Nevertheless, Mr. Trenton, you seem to have it.”

“Ridiculous. Find her relatives.”

“She claimed she had none. That after her husband died, and the little Js—that’s what she called them—she was the last sprig on the family tree. It’s the only reason that poor excuse for a will could ever stand up. Her estate is worth a good deal of money. Seven figures, perhaps even eight. She must have been taken with you, sir.”

No, I thought, I’m the one who was taken. But I don’t intend to stay taken.

“It’s put me in a lousy position, Mr. Rutherford. I found her, and pending the autopsy I look like a man with a motive for killing her. You see that, right?”

“Did you have any reason to believe you were in line to inherit? Perhaps you saw that scrap of a will before Mrs. Bell’s decease?”

“No, but Deputy Pelley told me the envelope it was in was unsealed. A county attorney who wanted to make a case could say I had access to it.”

“Time will take care of this,” Rutherford said. Which meant nothing. He had adopted a soothing voice he probably used on distraught clients. Those with money, at least, and it seemed that I now had a lot more than what was in my 401k. “If the will is unchallenged and goes through probate, you can do what you wish with the proceeds. Sell the house. Give the money away to worthy charities, should you decide to do so.”

He didn’t go on to say that charity begins at home, but his tone suggested it. I had had enough. He wanted to discuss the serpentine legal trail that lay ahead, but I had my own serpents to worry about. It was dark outside and I was scared. I thanked him and ended the call.

Had she made her will and then killed herself, with an overdose of Digoxin or sotalol?

No, I thought. The little Js wouldn’t like that. I could end up in the county jail, where see us roll us dress us would do no good. The verdict at the inquest will be accidental death, but in the meantime I’ll be here… and they’ll be here.

“Because they want me to stay,” I whispered.

I took a shower, put on a pair of gym shorts, closed the door to the en suite bathroom, and lay down on Greg Ackerman’s big double bed. As a more-or-less swinging bachelor, he’d probably shared it with any number of honeys. My own honey was gone. In the ground. Like my son.

I crossed my arms over my chest in an unconscious gesture of protection and stared up at the ceiling. It hadn’t been her, it had been them. They wanted me to stay. They wanted to work on me. They wanted me to take over from their mother, so they wouldn’t have to go to wherever uneasy revenants go to. They liked it right here on Rattlesnake Key. Where—if I didn’t want my head filled with tumbling and repetitive thoughts, if I didn’t want to hear the stroller’s squeaky wheel behind me—I would live in Allie’s house. I would eat in Allie’s kitchen and sleep in Allie’s bed. I would push them in their stroller.

I would eventually come to see them.

I don’t have to stay here, I thought. I’ve got a rental car with a full tank of gas. I can get away. Away from them. I don’t think the County Sheriff will issue a warrant for my arrest, although some judge might issue a bench warrant ordering me to come back pending the inquest… Rutherford would know, and I guess he’s my lawyer now… but I’d fight it. And while the lawyers wrangled, Jake and Joe would be getting weaker. Because she’s gone and I’m what they have.

Yes. All true enough. And I was scared, you can believe that. There’s a line from Scorsese’s Mean Streets that’s always resonated with me: “You don’t fuck around with the infinite.” But I was also angry. I had been put in a box I wasn’t supposed to escape. Not by their mother—in my heart I was sure that Allie Bell hadn’t been in on this—but by a couple of kids. Dead kids, in fact.

I had no secret weapon to fight them with, no cross or garlic to ward off vampires (which, if I was right, is sort of what they were), no rite of exorcism, but I had my mind, and I was too damn old to be pushed around by Bad and Badder.

If Allie hadn’t built the box I was in, how could they have done it? Most little boys—I had one, remember—can hardly plan a trip to the bathroom.

I fell asleep thinking of Donna, minutes from her end: You’re all grown up! Look how tall you are!

Squeak. Squeak. Squeak.

I didn’t come awake in the dark at least, because I hadn’t turned off the lights. This time the stroller’s squeaky wheel wasn’t coming from the en suite; it was further away. I thought it was in the part of the house Greg grandly called “the guest quarters.” Those quarters consisted of a small living room on the ground floor and a spiral staircase leading up to a bedroom and attached bathroom on the second.

The stroller was in the guest bedroom. The real stroller might be still in the garage, but the ghostly one was also real, and so were the twins pushing it so maniacally back and forth.

The thoughts seeped back in. They were low at first but grew louder, as if an unseen hand was turning up the volume. See us, roll us, dress us. See us, roll us, dress us! SEE US, ROLL US, DRESS US!

I lay on my back, clutching my hands together on my chest, biting my lip, trying to make the thoughts—their thoughts, my thoughts—stop. I might as well have insisted that the sun not go down. I could still think other thoughts—how long that would last I didn’t know—and there seemed to be only three courses of action I could pursue: lie here and go mad once those earworms swallowed everything; go down and touch the stroller in the garage, which would silence them for the time being; or confront the twins. That’s what I decided to do.

I thought, I won’t be driven mad by children.

And I thought, roll us, roll us, push us, push us. We’re yours, you’re ours.

I got off the bed and started down the upstairs gallery to the guest quarters. Halfway there the squeaking wheel stopped. I didn’t, and the thoughts—roll us, push us, dress us, we’re yours, you’re ours—didn’t, either. I didn’t hesitate at the door, which was ajar. If I had stopped to think in the part of my mind that was still capable of independent thought, I would have turned tail and run. What was I going to do in there? I had no idea. Telling them to go home or get a spanking certainly wouldn’t work.

What I saw froze me in place. The stroller was beached in the middle of the floor. Jacob and Joseph were in the guest bed. They were no longer children… yet they were. The bodies under the coverlet were long, the bodies of full-grown men, but the heads, although grotesquely swollen, were those of children. Rattlesnake poison had so bloated those heads that they had become pumpkins with Halloween faces. Their lips were black. Their foreheads, cheeks, and necks were stippled with snakebites. The eyes were sunken but hellishly alive and aware. They were grinning at me.

Bedtime story! Bedtime story! Bedti—

Then they were gone. The stroller was gone. One minute the twins were there, waiting for their bedtime story. At the next the room was empty. But the coverlet was turned down on both sides in neat triangles, and that bed had been perfectly made when I came here from Massachusetts. I had seen it for myself.

My legs were stilt legs again. I went into the room on them and looked at the bed where the boys had been. I didn’t mean to sit on it but I did because my knees gave out. My heart was still thundering away and I could hear myself, as at a distance, gasping for breath.

This is how old men die, I thought. When I’m found—probably by Pete Ito—the medical examiner would conclude it was a heart attack. They wouldn’t know I had been scared to death by two dead men with the heads of children.

Only the twins wouldn’t like me to die, would they? Now that their mother was gone, I was their only link to the world in which they wanted to stay.

I reached out to touch a turned-down triangle of coverlet with each hand and knew they didn’t like this bed. They had their own beds in the house down the road. Good beds. Their mother would have kept their room just the way it had been on the day they died, forty-some years ago. Those were the beds they liked, and when I lived there I would tuck them in at night and read them Winnie-the-Pooh, as I had to Tad. I certainly wouldn’t read them Tad’s Monster Words, because they were the monsters.

When I could get up, I walked slowly back down to the gallery to my own room. I might not sleep, but I didn’t think I’d hear the stroller’s squeaky wheel again that night. The visitation was over.

There was never a question of keeping the car in which my son had died. We wouldn’t have kept it even if it hadn’t been bashed at a dozen places by the dog trying to get in and get at them. A wrecker brought it back to our house. Donna refused to even look at that, either. I didn’t blame her.

There was no junkyard in Castle Rock. The closest was Andretti’s, in Gates Falls. I called them. They came, got the Pinto—the death car—and ran it through the crusher. What came out was a cube shot through with bright seams of glass—windows, taillights, headlights, windshield. I took a picture. Donna wouldn’t look at it.

By then the arguments had started. She wanted me to go on her weekly pilgrimages to Harmony Hill, where Tad was buried. I refused that as she had refused to look at the crushed cube of the death car. I said Tad was at the house for me, and always would be. She said that sounded highflown and noble, but it wasn’t true. She said I was afraid to go. Afraid I’d break down, and of course she was right. I imagine she saw it in my face every time she looked at me.

She was the one who moved out. I came back from a business trip to Boston and she was gone. There was a note. It said the usual things, you can probably guess: Can’t go on this way… start a new life… turn the page… blah-blah-blah. The only really original thing was the line she’d scrawled under her name, perhaps as an afterthought: I’m still in love with you and I hate you and I’m leaving before hate gets the upper hand.

Probably I don’t have to tell you I felt the same way about her.

Deputy Zane called me the next morning while I was spooning up Rice Chex—not enjoying them, just gassing up for the day. He said the autopsy had been completed. Alita Bell, wife to Henry, mother to Jacob and Joseph, had died of a heart attack.

“The ME said it was amazing she lived as long as she did. She had ninety per cent blockages, but that wasn’t all. There was cardiac scarring, which means she’d suffered a number of previous heart attacks. Small ones, you know. He also said… well, never mind.”

“No, go ahead. Please.”

Zane cleared his throat. “He said even little heart attacks, ones you might not even feel, impair cognition. That could explain why she sometimes believed her children were still alive.”

I thought of telling him that I knew her children were alive, or half-alive, and I’d never had a heart attack. I think I almost did tell him.

“Mr. Trenton? Vic?”

“Just thinking about that,” I said. “Does this let me off the hook for the inquest?”

“Nope, you still have to be here for that. You found the body.”

“But if it was a heart attack, pure and simple—”