House of Echoes: A Novel Read online

  “Any luck on those butterflies, Charlie?” Ben asked. He slipped the phone into his pocket.

  Charlie had become very attached to a book that Ben had given him before they’d moved up here. It was about Hickory Heck, a boy who’d left his city life to live in the wild. Heck made his own clothes, gathered his own food, and he’d even hollowed out his own home under a massive tree. One of Heck’s many fantastic nature-themed adventures involved filling mason jars with butterflies of every color and training them to dance in the candlelight that illuminated his cozy burrow. Charlie had found some caterpillars a few days ago and put them in a jar filled with leaves. He hoped to teach them to dance when they turned into butterflies.

  “I think they just need to eat some more. I gave them leaves, but they don’t like the dandelions,” Charlie said. “I don’t know why. You’d think they would.”

  “I called someone about getting a truck up here to take away that mess in the basement,” Caroline said.

  The Crofts had been filled with the detritus of the house’s previous inhabitants. Furniture had been left to molder, along with stacks of newspapers and magazines, piles of warped boxes, and dozens of broken appliances from past decades. One of the first things Caroline had Ben do was to move it all into the basement.

  “If I were a caterpillar, I’d eat dandelions,” Charlie said.

  “Me too,” Ben said. “And you know Bub would eat them, too, if we gave him a chance.”

  “But the man I talked to won’t carry it out of the basement himself,” Caroline said.

  “Did you offer to pay him extra?”

  “Of course, but he said he had a bad back and no insurance. Besides, I don’t really want anyone from the village inside until we’ve finished fixing up the place.”

  “When’s he coming?”

  “Tomorrow, sometime in the morning. He wasn’t specific.”

  “Okay.” Ben tried to keep his face expressionless, but Caroline still heard something in his voice.

  “What was I supposed to do, Ben? We need that crap out of here.”

  He could see the cords of her neck tense, and he didn’t need to look under the table to know that her well-muscled runner’s legs were jackhammering away at the antique walnut.

  “It’s just that it’ll take a long time to get all of that outside,” Ben said.

  “What else were you going to do today?”

  “I was going to sand the floor in one of the second-floor bedrooms,” Ben said. “And the bookstore in Exton called. My order’s ready. I was hoping to pick it up.”

  “Maybe it won’t take as long as you think,” Caroline said.

  But the garbage in the basement took up rooms and rooms of space. Much of it had been there before Ben had added to it with the junk from the rest of the house. He was sure that Caroline had no idea how much was down there.

  “You’re probably right.”

  “I can help you, Dad,” Charlie told him.

  “Thank you, buddy,” he said. It was rare for Charlie to volunteer for indoor work on a sunny day when the forests and fields waited just beyond the door. Ben saw that today could still be a good day, and that was enough to buoy him. He pulled the boy out of his chair and onto his lap. Charlie was too big for this, but this morning he let Ben get away with it. His hair was dark and thick like Ben’s.

  Caroline picked Bub out of his chair and wet a napkin with her tongue to scrub the cherry juice from his face. Bub’s hair was blond and fine like his mother’s.

  “What books did you order?” Caroline asked.

  “A couple that people have been talking about, and a few more that sounded interesting.”

  “Do you have an idea?”

  She was asking about his next book. Ben enjoyed how mysterious his process seemed to Caroline. To her analytical mind, this whole part of his life was opaque.

  “An idea,” he said. He drew his fork through the syrup to see the glistening script it left behind. “But not much more than that.”

  The truth was that he’d written a good hundred fifty pages of what he’d thought would be his third book, but the novel had soured on him since he’d moved up here. It was a problem he couldn’t account for. His last literary thriller had been a success, and he’d begun this next project with an abundance of confidence, but it had somehow fallen apart. It was as if the gravity had dissipated at the core of the thing, and the pieces had drifted apart. He was just beginning to admit to himself that it had all been a terrific waste.

  He looked up to smile at her. “If it turns into anything, I’ll let you know.” Charlie stirred restlessly on his lap. “This one’s had too much sugar to sit still,” Ben said.

  “Best thing to do with energy is to put it to work,” Caroline said.

  Ben moved Charlie back to his chair and stood up. “Help Mom clean up here, okay, buddy?”

  “Where are you going?” Caroline asked.

  “Hudson found a dead raccoon,” Ben said. “Made a mess of himself. I have to wash him off and I want to bury the thing so he doesn’t get into it again.”

  “Can I see?” Charlie asked.

  “It’s really stinky, Charlie.” He ruffled the boy’s hair. “Help Mom with the dishes, and I’ll be back soon.”

  “Don’t come back stinky,” Caroline said.

  Ben was halfway out the door when he turned around. “And I saw more bear tracks by the lake, so if you guys go outside, make sure to bring a whistle.” He’d read on the Internet that bears were afraid of loud noises. He’d bought a set of whistles for that purpose.

  “It would be cool to see one, wouldn’t it, Dad?”

  Ben thought about the eviscerated deer, about the long red streaks that had been drawn over the ground with its insides.

  “No, buddy. I don’t think so.”

  —

  He hosed Hudson off in the shed. As the beagle shook himself dry, Ben stood out of range to listen to the lawyer’s voice mail. The saga of his grandmother’s estate had gone on for months longer than he’d expected. The meager price they’d gotten for her tiny house in New Jersey, a few thousand dollars in savings, and a tract of virtually worthless land attached to a derelict farmhouse here in Swannhaven were the extent of the estate’s assets. Neither Ben nor his brother, Ted, had known that Grams owned land up here—land inherited from her own parents, Ben assumed. But it was on a trip to see this old farmstead that he’d learned the vast house between the mountains was for sale. It was then that the notion of an escape from the city had been born.

  Caroline handled their finances, but at the time of Grams’s death, Ben hadn’t wanted to put any further stress on her. Such matters were beyond his expertise, but his grandmother’s legacy barely amounted to six digits, and Ben had expected it would be a simple matter to deal with the estate. In this, he’d been wrong. There were times when he thought that the lawyer was taking him for a ride, eking out every possible penny, one billable hour at a time. Other times Ben thought this was just another example of how their luck had suddenly soured.

  According to the voice mail, Ben’s mother was the newest problem. While Grams had bequeathed her daughter a few thousand dollars, she’d split the majority of her assets between her two grandsons. All Ben’s mother had to do was sign a few documents to receive the behest, but these signatures had proved elusive. Which could only mean she wanted something more.

  Over the last decade, Ben had made it a personal mission to indulge the woman as little as possible. As with all addicts, her needs were an abyss that only deepened with each shovelful of good intentions you tossed in. But every phone call and certified letter the lawyer wasted in prodding her cost money. As Ben deleted the voice mail, he knew he would have to call her himself, despite the fact that this was surely exactly what she wanted.

  “Clean again, but how long will it last, Hud?” he said once the dog finished shaking himself dry. Ben stooped to rub the beagle’s head and got a lick to his face.

  After he dropped Hudso
n just inside the kitchen door, Ben returned to the shed for a shovel. With it hoisted over his shoulder, he made his way to the ruined building off the drive.

  Birds were all over the deer when Ben got there. The nasty black things moved only when he menaced them with the shovel. When they hopped away, they scattered blood from the ends of their glossy wings. Either ravens or crows—he’d have to look up the difference. Whatever they were, an entire ugly flock of them.

  Ben dug a shallow hole a few feet from the tree line, then heaped the guts into it. He was again struck by the damage the animal had taken. Other than the hooves and the odd intestine, he couldn’t identify many of the body parts. He guessed that the bear had taken the rest of it, but he didn’t see how it could have eaten the head or so much of the hide. It occurred to him that he didn’t even know if bear ate deer or would be able to catch one in the first place. Perhaps there were wolves after all, he thought. Ben had believed that the howls they heard at night were coyotes, but he could only guess at what lived in the dark of the old forest.

  Once he’d scraped up as much of the animal as he could, he did his best to cover the hole. By the time he was finished, he knew that it wouldn’t fool any of the scavengers in the forest. Wouldn’t even fool the crows. A dozen of them were perched on what remained of the fallen building’s roof, utterly motionless as they watched with their obsidian eyes.

  Ben trudged back up to the shed to rinse the shovel. He’d have to walk Hudson on the upper fields by the lake until nature disposed of the animal’s remains. The trees by the lake were older than the rest. Standing in their shadow made Ben feel like a child. The first time Hudson had seen the lake’s mirror surface, he couldn’t resist throwing himself into it, and it had taken Ben ten minutes to coax him out. Ben smiled at the memory, then the sound of wings shook him from his thoughts.

  He turned around to see the group of startled crows aloft, cawing as they filled the air with their dancing shadow bodies. A murder, he remembered. That’s what a flock of crows is called.

  3

  Ben didn’t like the cellar.

  A single stained bulb lit its front room, casting the space in a murky orange; the light wavered as if it might desert its station at any moment. The air was musty with the rot of ancient upholstery and the moldering that takes grip when moisture meets neglect. Chairs, tables, old mattresses, piles of ragged clothes, broken clocks, boxes of photos, and bundles of newspapers were arranged around the room. Ben grimaced—a claustrophobe’s nightmare.

  The cellar had many rooms; even Ben wasn’t sure how many. Only one set of stairs reached this floor, and the space was too packed to traverse. At first he’d thought that if he spent an extended amount of time working down here, he’d get used to the noises from the pipes and the heavy presence of the rooms just beyond his sight. Instead, he shuttled back and forth, carrying things outside, and every time he came back down the stairs, he had to reassure himself that nothing had occupied the space while he’d been gone.

  Considering what Charlie had gone through back at his old school, Ben wouldn’t have blamed him for giving the cellar a wide berth. But the boy often surprised him, and Ben was happy for his company. When they’d finally cleared a path through the junk he’d put in the cellar a few weeks ago, they began on the junk that had been there before. More of the same: clumps of ancient periodicals fossilized into solid blocks, fragments of broken furniture, and pieces of rusted sewing machines. He was glad when they reached an empty light socket. He held his breath as he screwed in a new bulb. Ben vanquished more of the dark but paid for the privilege with the sight of another century’s worth of mess in the rooms within the light’s range.

  “Not that, Charlie,” Ben told him, and Charlie put down the rocking chair he was trying to lift. “How about the newspapers?”

  Charlie looked suspiciously at the towers of newspapers. “They smell.”

  “Everything down here smells, buddy.”

  “Do you think Hickory Heck’s burrow is like this?” Charlie asked.

  Ben smiled; he remembered when he’d been young and could get so caught up in the world of a book.

  “It’s probably dark like this, but I bet it smells a lot better,” Ben said. “It probably smells like earth and rain where Heck lives. That’s a nicer smell, isn’t it?”

  “A lot nicer,” Charlie said.

  “Everyone working hard down here?” Caroline asked as she came down the stairs. Her hair was pulled back, and a smear of blue paint stretched from her nose to her cheekbone. She was flushed and grimy from painting one of the second-floor rooms. Ben thought she looked beautiful like this. “God, there’s a lot.”

  “We’re making a dent. Aren’t we, Charlie?” Ben said. He put down the box he’d been unburying from a pile of ancient couch cushions and reached around to the small of Caroline’s back, pulling her toward him.

  “I’m filthy,” she said, pushing him away.

  “So am I.” He kissed her neck.

  “Those old ladies must have been crazy to keep all this junk.”

  “I’m going up,” Charlie said, as he headed to the stairs. His skinny arms strained under the weight of a packet of bundled newspapers.

  “Is he going to hurt his back?” Caroline asked Ben.

  “Kids can’t hurt their backs,” he said, stooping down to the storage box to test its weight. “Thirty-four-year-old men with old track injuries, however…”

  “Poor baby.” She laid both hands on his shoulders. “A morning around this house is better than a session at Equinox,” she said, prodding his muscles with the tips of her fingers. She hardly ever touched him like this anymore.

  “Are you hitting on me? Tell me again how filthy you are.”

  “What’s in this thing?” she asked. She bent down to get a better look at the box he’d uncovered.

  “Just clothes, but they’re packed in there pretty tight. I might need your help carrying it up.”

  “I wish they’d cleaned out the place,” she said, referring to the bank from which they’d bought the Crofts. “You’d think it would be standard to do something like that.”

  Few things about their purchase of the Crofts had been standard. After the death of the spinster sisters, a local bank had taken possession of the property on account of unresolved debts. When that bank collapsed last summer, it was bought by a larger bank, which had to sell itself for pennies on the dollar a few months later to an even larger bank. This last bank, headquartered almost a thousand miles away and saddled with the same toxic assets that had sunk the previous two, was happy to rush the sale of the Crofts to the Tierneys. A year ago the local bank might have laughed at their offer on the property, but times had changed. With the local staffs of the two previous banks terminated, a lawyer from the city had rushed north to manage the sale, and many a corner was cut in the name of expediency.

  Caroline opened the box and pulled out a pair of matching floralprint sundresses. Yellow tulips against red cotton, the flowers arranged as if they had rained from heaven. The house had stood for over two centuries, and the little sundresses made Ben wonder how many children had been born and raised within its walls. It was hard to imagine the people who had lived here before them when all he could do was guess from the ruined things they’d left behind.

  The baby monitor clipped to Caroline’s waist emitted a short blast of noise. Ben and Caroline listened until they were sure that Bub hadn’t woken up.

  “Baby dream,” Ben said.

  “There’s a big pile up there, Mom,” Charlie said on his way back down the stairs.

  “How big is this truck that’s coming tomorrow, anyway?” Ben asked her.

  “Don’t tell me you’re giving up already.”

  “It’s just that there’s a big difference between filling up a van and filling up an eighteen-wheeler. If he doesn’t have enough room for it tomorrow, I’m not sure we want all this rotting on the lawn.”

  “I hate the idea of all this stuff down here,”
Caroline said.

  “Actually, some of it isn’t too bad. This is a nice little piece, isn’t it?” He turned his flashlight on a small dark-wood captain’s desk with inlaid leather. “What do you think?”

  “No, Ben. It’s all got to go.” Her voice got hard-edged as she shook her head, her blond locks coming loose to whip at the air. “That’s not the style we’re going with. The last thing I want is for this to look like a patchwork of different styles. I hate that.”

  “I’m sorry, you’re right.” Ben nodded quickly. He hadn’t meant to wind her up, but these days almost anything could do it. “A clean slate. Don’t worry, I remember.”

  “I mean, that’s why we’re killing ourselves to get this right, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “I’ll bring some more of this outside; then if you could give me the guy’s number, I’ll find out how big his truck is. If it’s on the small side, I’ll schedule him again for his next available slot. Okay? We want all this out as soon as possible.”

  “Otherwise it’s just festering down here.”

  “Yep.” Ben found himself nodding again, and soon Caroline was nodding as well.

  Bub’s gurgles came out of the baby monitor as digitized spurts laced with static. The sound sent Caroline for the stairs.

  “If you could put the guy’s number on the kitchen island?” he called after her. When he turned back, he saw Charlie trying to pick up the captain’s desk. “Leave the big stuff for me, okay? How about you get some of those couch cushions?” Charlie picked one off the floor. “No, not that one, Charlie. Get one of the really disgusting ones. Yes, that one. Thank you. That’s a huge help.” He watched Charlie lumber up the stairs with a cushion as large as himself.

  Ben stooped to pick up the captain’s desk. He thought it was better to get rid of it now, in case Caroline saw it down here again and thought he’d forgotten. It had been a stupid thing to say to her. He knew better, but more than that he knew in his guts that he didn’t want to keep any of these old things. No matter how much the Tierneys made the Crofts their own, the presence of the house’s former inhabitants would linger if given the chance. He felt this in the way that every empty room seemed to recoil at his presence when he walked the halls on sleepless nights. Better to throw it all away and be done with it. Better not to give the ghosts any furniture of their own to sit on.