Ashes and Entropy Read online

  The woman stood up, brushed her hair back from her forehead and bit her lip. “Helping?”

  Then she went back to scraping, the blade stuttered along against the wood grain, leaving gouges in the siding.

  “Whoa, whoa. Hold ‘er there.” Trevor reached around the woman and pulled the scraper from her hand. “You can’t do that. You one of the owners?”

  The woman shook her head. “I’m sorry. I heard about the heads. A friend of mine was at Dave’s Bar yesterday and called me. I want to help.”

  “You can’t, lady. Two reasons. My insurance doesn’t cover you, and you’re doing it all wrong. You’ll add weeks to the job scratching the wood up like that.”

  Tears welled up in the woman’s eyes and she looked down at her feet. “It’s my son. He went sailing a few years ago and he never came back. He was sixteen.”

  “What the hell does that have to do with—” Trevor stopped when he remembered what went down at Dave’s Bar the previous night.

  When the news had come on Greg made Suzanne, the barkeep, turn up the volume. He squawked in triumph when they reported a young woman’s bones found by a river in Kansas. The photo looked a lot like the bay window knot. Greg had informed the bar in his drunken foghorn voice that the house they were working on was psychic. Most people laughed, someone bought him a shot of tequila, but clearly some had believed.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. About your son. But I can’t let you help.”

  “Can I stay and watch? I’ll bring coffee? Maybe this is all coincidence.” She waved dismissively at the house. “But it’s something. You can’t imagine what it feels like to lose your kid.”

  Trevor thought about Cheryl. Sitting at the living room window in the buttery morning sun, hand on her belly. Then a few weeks later pale in the oncoming headlights, towels stacked under her, fussing about staining the car seat as he ran red lights all the way to the hospital.

  “Fine. Just don’t get in the way.”

  Her name was Ellen. She was the first of the hopefuls.

  ~

  So many people coming to the house. At first two, then six. They sat in the yard. Some in fold-out chairs, some on blankets. They sat all day and watched the painters, at times getting up to inspect a newly cleared section of siding.

  Each knot they uncovered sent them rushing forward, en masse, to examine it in silence. One after another shoulders fell in disappointment, and they turned and shuffled back to their seats. After a few minutes the chatter would begin. Speculations as to who it was. Which news story, which person found.

  From his front lawn where he stood watering his roses he felt a tingle of apprehension. He had to be really careful now. With so many people around. He went inside.

  In the kitchen he poured two glasses of Coke, waited for the hiss of the bubbles to fade, then took them down.

  ~

  A woman crossed the street and paused at the end of the walk. The hopefuls had been passing around a thermos of coffee and cuttings from newspapers—both from original news stories of those they’d lost, and recent ones of those who’d been found. Conversation guttered into silence as they saw her standing there. She walked slowly up the cobbled path to the house. The first of the hopefuls, Ellen, jumped up and gave her the tour. Without speaking she led the older woman from head to head, then brought her to one of the fold-out chairs, kicking a ‘missing husband’ hopeful onto the lawn.

  “Who is she?” Trevor took the cold can of Coke from Ellen at break time. Good to her word she’d been supplying the painters with coffee, soda, sandwiches, and keeping the rest of those gathered from interfering with their work.

  “The War Widow. Joyce Freeman. She lives over there.” Ellen pointed to a house across the street and three doors down. “She’s been watching us. I’m glad she came over.”

  “Huh. Never heard of her. She got a missing person?”

  “I’m surprised you don’t know the story. I guess you were a kid when it happened.” Ellen spoke quietly so he had to lean in a bit. She looked good today. Eyes clear. Not so sad. “Her husband was in ‘Nam. Big war hero. Fifth Special Forces Group out of Fort Bragg. He died rescuing a trapped patrol.”

  “Man. That sucks.” Trevor looked at the woman, her eyes glazed over with years of grief and solitude, her grey-white hair pinned in a loose bun. “But I don’t get it. He’s dead. Not missing.”

  “She’s not here for her husband. She was pregnant when he went to Vietnam. Her family is one of the first families of the area. Inherited money. She moved into that house so her parents could help her take care of the little girl. Poor thing, five years old, was playing in the yard and vanished.”

  “The fuck? Poor woman.” Trevor broke the tab off his Coke can and flicked it into a waste bin. “Some fucking people.”

  ~

  Police at the house. The two painters and the woman who came every day spoke with them. One officer snapped some photos while the other took a few notes. They shook their heads as the woman’s arms rose and fell with her desperate pleas, her mouth and shoulders tight at their refusal. He couldn’t hear what they said, but he imagined the police’s skepticism. Their denial.

  When the police car pulled away a few minutes later, he exhaled.

  He didn’t know what to do. Any move could lead to problems, questions. He could go away for a bit, but he didn’t know how to do that cleanly.

  So he would do nothing, for now, but watch.

  ~

  Oakland Tribune, May 7, 1986

  Psychic House: Hope or Hoax?

  House in Berkeley Hills predicts ‘Missing Persons’ Found

  The past week has seen five cases of missing persons solved. First it was the discovery of the body of poet Weldon Kees in Mexico. Kees went missing in 1955, leaving his Plymouth Savoy parked near the Golden Gate Bridge, keys in the ignition. Then there was Bobby Stewart, who vanished on the way home from basketball practice, and Janette Anderson, who disappeared from the Bay area after pressing abuse charges against her husband in 1973. A startup company will be able to recover some of their lost profits from Albert Winger, who turned up in Los Angeles living under an assumed identity and has been arrested for embezzlement and fraud.

  Yesterday a scuba diver discovered a leg bone from what is suspected to be the remains of either Theodore Cole or Ralph Roe. The two famously escaped from Alcatraz in 1937.

  House painters Greg Brand and Trevor Tremblay of the Oakland-based band Rock Encounters uncovered unique shapes in the wood siding of a Victorian house…

  ~

  “Check it out, man. They mention the band!” Greg fanned the paper at Trevor’s face.

  “Let me see.” Trevor grabbed it and scanned the article. “So that last dude was one of the Alcatraz guys. Huh.”

  The painters were taking apart the scaffold and moving it to the back of the house. The hopefuls were moving too. Coolers and lawn chairs, blankets and sun-umbrellas. Up on the platform Trevor felt like he was at some weird kind of festival, the spectators talking in hushed tones about who might be next. If their loved one would be found alive, or if a bundle of bones was all they’d get back. Something to lay to rest.

  “Have you noticed how they’re divided?” Greg loosened a bolt on the metal tubing. “Over there you have the parents. That side you’ve got spouses. And those are the siblings and kids. I hear them talking, too. Some of them think they know what they’re gonna get.”

  “Huh?”

  “You know, a live one or a body.”

  At lunch Ellen delivered sandwiches. Meatloaf. Trevor’s favorite.

  “So. Does she have a feeling about her daughter?” He nodded toward the war widow.

  Ellen tightened her lips, a grimace more than a smile. “Alive, she thinks. Says she can feel her. But a lot of us believe that until they call us to identify the remains. Not me. I know my son’s dead.”

  ~

  She’s out there every day. The widow from down the street. They’ve moved behind the house, so he
can’t see anymore. Each night he goes and looks for heads. They’ve done the front, the West side. Nearly done the back. Each missing person they find is closer. He’s been mapping the discoveries. Mexico. Kansas. LA. The Bay—closer each time.

  He climbed down the stairs to her room.

  Some days she hid from him. He would play her game—look under the bed, behind the candy-colored dresses in the wardrobe—then leave her to her mischief, his chest heavy with disappointment that he hadn’t seen her. Today she sat in the middle of the room in front of her mirror. Dressed in yellow, radiant like the first day he saw her, drawing him, even now. She didn’t move, so he placed the glass beside her.

  He had brought the mirror to her as a birthday present. He liked watching her comb and braid her hair. He didn’t like how much attention she paid to the mirror, to the person she saw there. But when he took it away she screamed and screamed. An endless wail that he heard in his sleep, even though no sound could escape this room.

  “How are you feeling, my girl?”

  “Tired. But we’ll feel better soon. It won’t be long now.” She smiled at her reflection.

  “What won’t be long?”

  She didn’t answer.

  He sat on her bed—a four-poster with a flowing pink canopy—his heart pounded, an ache sliced forward in his head. The sandwich he’d brought days before sat by the lamp, and its moldering stench made his stomach tighten. He stuck his hand in his sweater pocket and twined the lock of hair around his fingers until the nausea passed. So soft.

  ~

  “Joe fucking Satriani.”

  Greg was still obsessing about Friday’s gig on Monday morning. Trevor felt a little numb. He’d almost bailed on the tribute solo he’d planned, but in the end he took a deep breath and went for it—sliding from the riff in Satriani’s “Not of this Earth” into the bridge from “The Enigmatic” before hitting the solo from Rock Encounter’s own track, “Alien Warship.” Satriani, sitting in a booth near the back, had joined in the applause. Trevor was disappointed at the end of the night when he couldn’t track the great man down.

  “Tomorrow we’re on to the last wall.” Trevor changed the subject. “Ellen said the cops came again on the weekend. But they’re still not buying it. Said people see what they want to see. Besides, how do the heads help the cops, really?”

  “What was she doing here on the weekend? Not messing with the siding again?”

  “Naw. Checking in on the widow from up the street. Apparently she sits on the porch here a lot. Says she feels closer to her daughter.” Trevor scanned the group sitting on the lawn. “Surprised there are still so many hopefuls here. What are the odds we’ll find one of theirs?”

  Greg shook his head. “You suck at this kind of thing. We’re only finding people who went missing from the Bay area, man. A lot of these people moved here after their person went missing. But they come anyway. Misery loves company, right?”

  A tension slipped through the crowd when the painters broke down the scaffold at the end of the day. They’d only uncovered one head on the back wall. An old guy in round glasses. A couple in their 50s clung to each other as the man held up their picture with a trembling hand, making sure.

  “Oh my god. It’s Dad. We’re finally going to know.”

  The man had told Trevor about his father, who had Alzheimer’s and had wandered from the senior’s home just down the hill. Tears coursed down his face and he smiled.

  “Whatever it is, I just want it to be over.”

  ~

  He had to do something. They were almost at the end. Each missing person from closer, closer…he couldn’t let them finish.

  He went to the gas station and bought four jerry cans of fuel, and a lighter.

  The wait for darkness was agony. He sat at the window while the painters packed up for the day. The small group of watchers dispersed, each one pausing to hug the couple who’d found their person’s head.

  When he was ready, and night had come, he went downstairs to see his girl.

  “Mommy’s going to find out what you did.” She said, sitting primly in front of her mirror. Her dress in ruffles that swirled around her chubby knees.

  The fabric gleamed, the same yellow as the dress she’d worn that day in her yard. A sun-kissed dream picking dandelions and watering tomatoes with a pink plastic glass. The breeze had danced around her, the flowers strained toward her, everything was pulled by her magic. He couldn’t resist.

  He wanted to touch her now, her feather soft hair, to rest his fingertips on her chest, spider light. A shadow flickered across her eyes and she looked away from him. The last time he’d touched her had ended badly. So much noise. So much mess to clean up. Now was not the time.

  She pulled herself closer to the glass, cross-legged now, eyes closed, fingertips pressed against reflected fingertips, so lightly they left no mark. She whispered. Her breath too delicate to cloud the glass.

  “We’re here, we’re here, we’re here, we’re here…”

  He closed the door and locked it. His heart thudded. He wound his fingers in the lock of hair as he whispered his own prayer. They can never find her. She’s mine. My girl. It was a risk, but he had to finish it.

  He made two trips across the street. No one saw him. Taking a chance he poured one of the cans of gas across the front of the house and up the stairs. Around back he cracked the window next to the kitchen door. The trim was dry, the glazing putty crumbled, easy to lift a few shards out, reach in and unlock the door. He brought the jerry cans inside and splashed gas around. He worked from the bottom up, emptying one can per floor. Giving the rickety stairs a good douse on his way up.

  A sound from below. He listened. Nothing. He moved into one of the bedrooms and let a torrent of fuel spill across the wood floor.

  A creak on the landing inside the house. “Hello? Is someone there? I heard something break.” A female voice, shaking and high. The stairs creaked again. “That smell. Is there a gas leak…what’s going on?”

  He froze, unsure of what to do. She stepped into the bedroom. His neighbor, the widow.

  “Bill? What are you doing here? Why are you—” She looked at the plastic canister he held up-ended over the floor. Then she looked at his face, her eyes black in the unlit room.

  “Joyce—” There was nothing he could say.

  Her mouth opened, stretching wider and wider in horror. He waited for the scream. Then her jaw snapped shut and she rushed at him, feet skidding on the slick floor.

  “It was you! You took her.”

  Fury and raking nails. He tried to push her off but lost his footing and they fell.

  “Where is she? Where is she?” She screeched, louder and louder, right in his ear, fingers ripping at his hair.

  He scrambled free of her, and got to his knees. Gas dripped in his eyes, almost blinding him.

  She rolled over onto her stomach and crawled toward him, panting, teeth bared.

  He looked for a weapon, something to hit her with. On the floor in front of him lay the lighter.

  It was over. He knew it. He had to.

  He picked up the lighter, and for a moment she didn’t notice, her glare intent on his face, his guilt. He flicked the flint. It caught on the first try. Yellow. Bright in the darkness.

  “My daughter—” Her scream cut short as the flames washed across the floor between them.

  He closed his eyes and pictured her, waiting for him, beckoning. My girl.

  ~

  Greg came around the side of the building, a ladder under one arm, the red plastic top melted beyond repair. “Some of the scaffold looks okay. I talked to the rental company and they’re fine with a little scorching, as long as the metal’s still sound.” The police had given them the okay to recover their gear. “The rest of it we can maybe sell to the metal recyclers. I don’t know about our insurance. Man, this sucks.”

  “What the hell was she doing here?” Trevor stared at the house in shock.

  All the windows we
re shattered, the siding above black where flames and smoke had poured out only hours before. Half of the roof had collapsed, and the whole block reeked of death and burning.

  “She who?” Greg sifted around on the porch for any more of their equipment.

  “The widow, man. Get a freakin’ clue.”

  “Chill. You’re right. She shouldn’t have been here. And the other body. Who the hell was that? I’m sure the cops’ll have the whole story soon. We can grab a brew at Dave’s and wait for the report. Talk about our next gig. I got a tip there’s a California Bungalow in Frisco needs a good tune-up.”

  Trevor wasn’t sure if there would be a next gig. Cheryl had called, said she was staying in Ohio. Said her brother had a construction company and could give him a job. Then she’d said in a low, sad voice that she missed him. Wondered if maybe they could try again.

  He knew she meant more than just their relationship, and he’d been overcome with conflicting emotions. A warm anticipation and the gnawing fear of the hospital, the blood, and another potential snuffed out before he’d cradled it in his arms. He squatted and looked up at the charred remains of the house.

  “Hey man, what are you doing?” Trevor frowned as Greg climbed up onto the front porch. The burnt timbers creaking under his weight.

  “Wanna check and see if that dude’s face is still on the door.”

  Greg pulled back a section of roof that had fallen in front of the oak door. The wood was burnt to charcoal black, in some places it had crisped to ash—white flakes that shivered in the breeze. A few boards in the porch collapsed under him. Flailing and calling for help, Greg tried to pull his legs free. Trevor rushed up to the deck, hooked his arms under Greg’s and hauled him out. Under the weight of both of them the porch cracked, then gave, and Trevor fell back into the cavity below.

  “You all right, buddy?” Greg had managed to grab a joist and peered down from above.