The Damned Read online

Why not let me drive awhile, Danny?

  Her hand on the wheel. Pulling it hard to the right just as she did to drive Willa and Eddie into the Charles. Showing me it was her. How she did it. How she’ll do it again if she likes.

  The hand drifted up to me. The burnt fingers landing wet and bone-nubbed on my chin. Pulled my head to look at her. The darkness so dense only the white balls of her eyes, the sheen of congealed blood shone back.

  He’s waiting . . .

  I knocked her arm away. Then I was falling out of the car, hitting the street flat on my side. The same ear that took the hammer stroke earlier smacked the concrete and blared new trumpets of pain.

  When I rolled over and looked into the car, Ash wasn’t there. The passenger door open as if she’d run off into the field beyond the curb. Not that I was about to go looking for her.

  So I looked the other way. A pavement-eye view straight down the length of street.

  And saw that I was back where I started. Arndt Street. Malvo’s house a couple hundred feet away, the porch bulb still dimly burning, still a sun for the orbiting moth.

  After I’d rolled through east Detroit for half the night I parked here, passed out here, was awakened by my dead twin sister here.

  Why not let me drive awhile, Danny?

  This time, when I walked up to the front door, I knew I’d find it open.

  I knew that nobody would be sitting on the living room sofa, that the rock of crack would still be where it was in the tinfoil, the pipe untouched. The kitchen empty, the rolls of toilet paper greenly glowing in the fridge.

  But there was somebody there.

  Upstairs. Where I had to go.

  Where I was going now. Thinking of Willa and Eddie. Working to make them as present as I could so that I could take the next step up the stairs, and the next. There was no reason to face horror directly before, only the impulse to obey. It was why Ash had kept me where I’d been for so long, telling myself I had no choice. But there was always a choice. There was this: walking into the dark knowing something waited for me. So long as the idea of them stayed with me, I could raise my foot and look up into the second-floor shadows. I could do something other than hide.

  Even in the dark of Malvo’s bedroom I could see the flowerings of blood on the floor. The closet open, the cashbox where I’d opened it. The photos a checkerboard of flesh on the walls.

  But the ball-peen was gone.

  I checked the other two bedrooms. The same as they were before. The sliding door I’d barreled through still open, a tongue of outside air pulling back as though in revulsion at the taste.

  Which left the bathroom.

  The door was ajar. It let me slip past without touching it, squinting into the tub, around the corner at the toilet.

  Nothing.

  Though there was a sound. The hush of something sliding over the floor.

  It spun me around to see the bathroom door drifting closed. The sound coming from Bob Malvo’s bare toes leaving visible trails in the dust. The extension cord he used to tie around the hook in the door and his own neck pulled his head even with mine, so that his empurpled eyes seemed to appeal to me for help. His mouth fat-lipped. Hands black oven mitts over his crotch.

  I want to show you something.

  I plucked the photos off the closet wall and stuffed them into the cashbox along with all the clippings and notes. Picked the box up, cradled it with both arms against my chest like a baby I was carrying out of a fire. Down the stairs, out the door, leaving it open behind me not knowing if that was a good idea or not.

  Both car doors were still wide open. Ash could have climbed back in since I went inside. Or somebody else entirely.

  None of it stopped me from jumping in, dropping the box in the passenger footwell, and closing the doors. When I turned the keys in the ignition the engine started with an untroubled roar. Gentle on the gas. A weightless roll toward the pink line of dawn.

  This time, when I made it to Alfred Street, I took the turn.

  32

  * * *

  The house was still standing.

  The brick blackened by fire, the roof a makeshift cladding of plywood sheets, the foundation buttressed by a pair of steel beams jammed against a side wall. It would have been so much easier to let it fall, but somebody had gone to a minimum effort to see that it didn’t. A sign wired to the fence provided part of the explanation. DESIGNATED HISTORICAL SITE. It didn’t say what history happened here worth holding on to.

  This block of Alfred Street was only one among five thousand abandoned residential blocks in Detroit, and looked, at first, just like the others. The broad spaces between what was left of the existing structures, the surreal touches of a Dali painting—a stacked pile of real estate placards mutely calling FOR SALE, a naked mannequin propped against a wall, her arm raised in invitation. What was different about this street was that the houses were manors, even more haunting in their fall from grandeur. Less than a hundred years ago, the wealthiest people in the Midwest lived here, kept their shining horses in stables out back, parked the first automobiles ever made by the curb.

  They’re all dead now.

  It’s no trouble pulling open a slash in the fencing and squeezing through. A crunch through the waist-high grass brought me to the broad front steps, where it again proved easy to make my way inside. Someone before me had done some work with a crowbar on the wood barrier, returning it to a hinged door that could be pulled open and slid shut again, obscuring evidence of entry.

  Which meant I could go in the same way.

  Which meant there may be others in there with me.

  It was dark, but not without spokes of light here and there. It let me advance in a shuffle, plowing through the rusted cans and wet newspapers and waste, animal and human alike.

  There was nothing familiar about it, even though it was the place everything had changed for me. Only the smell. The acrid trace of carbon, burnt wood, and the chemicals used to start the fires that followed ours. The places that were once around here all torched on the Devil’s Nights, the orgies of citywide arsons the day before Halloween. But this house was still there. A crypt. A holder of secrets.

  Just as I was. The cashbox in my hand doubling in weight the deeper inside I went.

  If this was what Ash wanted, how was I supposed to give it to her? If it was the police I needed to hand it over to, how did I do that without instantly stepping forward as a prime suspect in Malvo’s death myself (not to mention Ash’s, my name probably still high on the list)? And then there was the question that arrived with every return of Bob Malvo’s swollen, plum-colored face: What difference does it make now?

  What brought me there was the idea that, as with any detective who has answered his client’s question, it was time to present my findings.

  I stopped myself from falling through the floor at the last second. A black square that my foot wavered over before being pulled back.

  On my knees, I put the cashbox next to the hole in the floor. It didn’t seem to be enough to simply leave it there. Isn’t the rule with ghosts that a speech is called for? A summoning? If a spell was required to make the witch return to her grave, I needed the right words to bury her.

  I meant to say Here it is but instead said, “I’m sorry.”

  Because I was. Sorry for what was done to her despite what she did to innocent others. I didn’t forgive her, I never would. But I was sorry for whatever it was she saw on the other side when she was born just as I was sorry I couldn’t have pulled her up, shown her I was ready to die for her because she was my sister, my blood.

  “It was the teacher,” I said to the empty house. “It’s all here. You and all the other girls, too. And Meg. It was Malvo. It was him.”

  I waited for a reply that didn’t come. Yet there was something now that breathed along with me. Something in the house. Or the house itself.

  “Now I need to ask you something,” I went on. “I need you to leave them alone.”

  Quiet.


  Not even the breathing anymore.

  There was the feeling that if I looked over the floor’s edge into the cellar I’d see her there, but I didn’t look.

  I STOPPED AT AN ELECTRONICS store on 7 Mile Road and bought a disposable cell phone. Called the Detroit Police and told the guy who answered to write something down. Bob Malvo’s name. Meg Clemens. Ashleigh Orchard. The address on Arndt, the address on Alfred. Directions where to look for a cashbox in a corner of what used to be the main-floor living room, a box with evidence that showed Malvo was their murderer, as well as maybe some other missing girls in central Michigan over the last couple decades.

  When I was done I pitched the phone over the guardrail onto the I-94 as I drove over it.

  Then I was on my own cell. Calling Willa.

  “Danny?” she said when she answered. “I’ve got good news.”

  “Me, too. You first.”

  “Eddie’s coming home. Can you frigging believe it? The doctors say he’s looking better than they expected, he can be monitored just as easily by me as by them—it’s all I do at that damn hospital anyway. He’s coming home, Danny!”

  “That’s wonderful,” I said, but nothing but a weepy garble came out.

  “What’s that?”

  “I said that’s so fucking wonderful!”

  “He can’t wait to see you, you know.”

  “Me, too.”

  “So what’s your news?”

  “I’ll tell you tonight in person,” I said. “I’m coming home, too.”

  AT THE AIRPORT I SAT down to the first proper meal I’d had since the breakfast buffet two days before. Fajitas and cold beer at a Mexican place that tasted so good I ordered another plate halfway through the first just in case. Nothing on my mind but ways to shave time off the trip between the airport and Porter Square after we landed. Maybe I could ask for a seat closer to the front once I got to the gate. Or reserve a car so that one was waiting for me instead of joining the lineup for a cab.

  As I ate, a couple of laughs came over me so abruptly I had to slap a napkin against my mouth. It was the Budget guy’s face when he came out to take a look at the Impala, the same guy who was behind the counter when I arrived. Took one walk around the car, noting the smashed front hood, the scratched driver side window, the missing hubcaps (which I hadn’t actually noticed).

  “They invented insurance for a reason,” he said. He leaned on the side of the car and, with perfect timing, the whole front fender fell off.

  My second dinner arrived. I might have started into it, too, but it was time to head to the gate for boarding. Still, it wouldn’t take more than a minute to see if I could line up a ride. I picked up the phone to start searching for car services at Logan when it vibrated in my hand.

  Not an incoming call or text. The home security app I had installed before I left. Filling my screen with the live image of my front hall.

  At first, it appeared to be a malfunction of some kind. There was nothing to see. No alarm to be alarmed about.

  I was about to turn the thing off when the door nudged open.

  A narrow band of darkness seeping in around the edge of the wood that grew wider, inch by inch.

  Along with an alert running across the bottom.

  . . . Unauthorized Entry . . . Unauthorized Entry . . . Unauthorized Entry . . .

  Ash walked in. Wearing the same candy striper uniform she’d worn at the hospital. Looked straight up at the camera. At me.

  Waved.

  33

  * * *

  I repeatedly tried to get Willa on the phone while running down the terminal hall to the gate. Left two messages on the landline. Okayed a 911 call through the app to report a break-and-enter in progress. Fired off three texts in between.

  GET OUT! NOW!

  She’s INSIDE

  i’m serious.

  Then my flight was being called, the doors closing, the PA announcing the last boarding call for Mr. Orchard, Mr. Daniel Orchard. I considered staying where I was, working the phone some more, trying to do something from my end before I was cut off in the air. But I knew that the only thing I could do was try to stop Ash myself, and I couldn’t do it from Detroit, so I ran to the door and slipped through, took my seat with the curious gaze of the other passengers burning into me.

  The one hour and forty-eight minutes roaring through the night between Detroit and Boston were the most wretched of my life, and that included a childhood with Ash. It included hell itself.

  My heart added a new kind of pain to its repertoire, a crushing weight pressed hard against its bone cage. More than once I thought my efforts to contain a scream would fail, that I would start kicking the chair in front of me or ripping the oxygen masks out of the ceiling and we’d have to land in Buffalo or Albany so I could be pulled off in handcuffs. I needed to stay calm until I got there. And then I needed to be ready to—to what? Change the game. I was through with trying to figure out what Ash wanted. That was the only thing that kept me in my seat the whole way. Conjuring all the ways I would make her feel something for once.

  As soon as we landed I was on the phone again. Multiple texts and voice messages popped up. I ignored them all and called Willa before we were parked at the gate.

  It rang close to a dozen times before she answered. Her voice hoarse. In the background, the sound of electronic bells ringing, the muffle of institutional air.

  “Oh, Danny. Oh my God. This—oh my Christ—”

  “Slow down, baby. Okay?”

  “—this isn’t fucking happening—”

  “Just tell me where you are.”

  “The hospital.”

  “Eddie?”

  “He was fine. Everything was fine. They couldn’t believe how well he was doing. When they said he could go home you should have seen—he was so happy. And then I went up to his room to bring him something to eat and . . .”

  “And what?”

  “He was gone, Danny.”

  A howl. It’s the only way to describe the noise I made, loud and brief and unforeseen, cut off by putting my mouth against my shoulder.

  “Willa,” I said when I was able, the flight attendant opening the door of the plane and everyone up and wrestling for their bags in the overhead compartments. “Gone how?”

  “Out. Asleep, but not asleep. I tried. I tried. But I couldn’t wake him up!”

  “A coma. Is that it?”

  “They’re not using that word. But yeah, it looks that way.”

  The passengers were shuffling down the aisle and out the door. Each of them taking a look down at me, the cause of concern in the second row they were glad to be putting behind them.

  “I saw the messages you left,” Willa said.

  “It was too late. I’m so sorry.”

  “How do you know it was her?”

  “The security camera. I saw her. Coming into the house.”

  “She did this to my son?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you said everything was okay. That you’d figured things out—”

  “I thought I had. I must have been wrong. Or maybe I was right, and it just doesn’t make a difference.”

  “If she did this, what’s stopping her from—from coming back? From taking him? If she could get into the house she could get into the hospital, too, right?”

  The hospital candy striper uniform. Showing me where she’d go next.

  “I’ll be there soon as I can,” I said.

  “Danny? What are we going to do?”

  The plane was emptied out except for me. The flight attendant looking my way, a look that said she was used to crazies who had to be pulled out of the sardine can at the very end of the day.

  But I was getting up all on my own. Rushing into the terminal, passing others, a dash toward the GROUND TRANSPORTATION sign that lit a new fire in my chest so that I couldn’t answer Willa’s question even if I had one to give.

  YOU’D THINK A HEART ATTACK would hurt most where your heart is. B
ut it can show up anywhere: down the length of your leg, the back of your head, a knuckling behind the eyes. I had three-alarm versions of them all as the cab descended into the Callahan Tunnel crossing from East Boston to downtown, the fluorescent tubes strobing as we roared through the earth.

  Then we were rising into the city at night, the driver weaving through the old streets designed for horse carts, running reds in pursuit of the extra hundred promised him if we did it quick.

  They were close now. The pain retreated like a rat when the lights get turned on.

  “How’s that?” the driver asked in thick Dorchester-ese as we pulled up to the hospital’s doors.

  I gave him everything I had.

  WILLA DIDN’T TOUCH ME.

  I wasn’t expecting an embrace or a kiss or anything—I’m not sure what I was expecting—but the way she jolted back when she saw me, an instinctual aversion to a known carrier of disease, threw me back as well. No mirror was necessary to see how I appeared to her: unclean, glassy-eyed, the yearning reach of the terminal case. Damned.

  We stood in the hallway outside Eddie’s room and took a moment to recover. Not as lovers, not as husband and wife, but as Adults in a Situation. The minimum control that made human speech possible. She told me Eddie’s coma had been confirmed, that the doctors were puzzled by how it came about, one saying it was like “someone reached inside him and turned out the light.” I told her the facts of what I discovered in Detroit and how I must have been wrong in thinking the discovery of the truth would stop Ash, wrong that the truth was what she was after in the first place.

  We stared at each other. Me concluding that there was no way to tell her how sorry I was. Willa trying not to swing her hand across my face.

  “Can I see him?” I said finally. Asking permission. The fantasy that I was his dad, his almost-dad, over in four words.

  “He loved you, you know,” Willa said, then took longer than she needed to correct herself. “Loves you.”

  I took Willa in. My happiness in the shape of a woman, short and salty and firm. She was mine for a time I knew might be brief but now felt like it never was at all.