“In a way, he was giving you a mystery to solve, not on purpose, but because those elements, those clues, were all that remained of his thinking on the matter. He might not even have known what those clues related to anymore, but they were important to him, and you were important, and he had enough savvy left to put those items together and have them stowed away in a safety-deposit box.”
“It really is Agatha Christie shit?”
“Let’s see what we got. The book, Dracula. I don’t think it means anything particularly. I believe your uncle was thinking about Illium. Not directly, perhaps. But the book had to do with Illium, and it merely indicates a connection.”
“Illium has, or had, the notes, is what you’re saying?”
“Could be. If he did have them, I figure whoever left him the little present of the kiddie pornography and the clothes found them and destroyed them. The coupons, now. Both Illium and your uncle had them, and they seem important, but not so important Illium’s killer took note of them. We certainly found them easy enough.”
“Meaning, if they were important,” Leonard said, “Illium’s murderer didn’t know they were.”
“Yeah. Your uncle gave some coupons to Florida to give to you, and he put some in a safety-deposit box. Illium had coupons in jars. But what’s it all mean? I haven’t come up with a thing on that.”
“The painting?”
“That one’s up to you, Leonard. Tell me about it.”
“I painted it when I was a kid, for my uncle. It’s of the old Hampstead place.”
“It’s a real place?”
“Yeah. It’s behind the house here, back in those woods. I used to go there now and then. The house was abandoned years ago. Hampsteads were white folks, and they owned all the woods back there. Used to be a couple hundred acres. The black community ended right behind the house here, where those woods begin. Guess it still ends there, but I don’t know if all that land’s still owned by the Hampsteads. They may have sold some of it. I really don’t know anything about it anymore. Just that the house was once a fine house, there was some tragedy in the family, and they moved out, but kept the land and the house, but didn’t attend to it. I been inside a couple of times. When I was a kid. Climbed through a window. It was a pretty spooky place. I don’t even know it’s still standing.”
“Better and better. Look here.” I picked up the pad and showed it to him. I had drawn a series of little rectangles within a series of lines.
“I don’t get it,” Leonard said.
“First day we came here, I saw a composition notebook on your uncle’s desk. I glanced at it. It had a drawing, or chart, or whatever, like this on it. I didn’t think much of it. I thought it was just doodling. For all I know, that’s what it was, but I suspicion it might be a note that didn’t end up with Illium. After the cops came, it disappeared. I guess they have it. Maybe they have more notes than we think, but I don’t believe so.”
Leonard studied the pad. I said, “I’m not sure I’ve remembered it exactly right, but that’s close. Does it make you think of anything?”
“A floor plan with six rectangles in it.”
“My thoughts exactly. What about the rectangles?”
“Furniture?”
“I don’t think so. But leave that for a moment. If it is a floor plan, it’s not to this house. Too many rooms. And the rectangles don’t correspond with your uncle’s furniture at all. Do you see what I’m getting at now?”
“If the coupons connect. If the book connects. Then the painting connects, or the location of it connects, and that location could go with this floor plan.”
“Right. We just don’t understand how they connect. Now, what comes in rectangles?”
“All kinds of things. A stick of gum. Books. He liked books, that could be it.”
“Proportion throws that. The rectangles are too big to be books if this is a legitimate floor plan.”
I hummed a few bars of the death march. Leonard’s eyes widened. “Graves,” he said.
“Ta-da!”
“You mean under the Hampstead place?”
“Could be.”
“I’ll be a sonofabitch.”
“When Florida wakes up, she’s going over to see her mother. When she does, you and I are going to go take a look at the Hampstead place.”
24.
Late morning, a half-hour after Florida left, we entered the woods, Leonard carrying a shovel, me with a flashlight clipped to my belt, my remembrance of Uncle Chester’s diagram folded up in my pants pocket.
At first the going was easy, as the woods were made up mostly of well-spaced pines and there were soft paths of straw to walk on, but soon the trees sloped uphill and there were hardwoods, vines and brambles, and the pines grew closer, and the going wasn’t so good. It was humid too, and the smell from the pines and sweet gums became cloying, like being splashed with a bucket full of cheap perfume.
We scouted around until we found a little animal path and made our way down that. Traveling became easier. We startled birds and a deer. About an hour later the trail trickled out at the edge of a little dry creek bed. We didn’t cross. Leonard led along the edge of the creek and deeper into the woods. We fought our way through the vines and brambles, and finally, thorn-torn, tired and hungry, we broke into the section of woods that held the house hostage.
Leonard leaned on the shovel, “I was set up right here when I painted it. It’s in worse shape now. I don’t remember a damn thing about the insides. There were fewer trees around it then.”
The house was huge and had once been elegant. Two-story, with a porch that went all around, lots of windows and a railed upper deck, now sagging, like a dental plate hanging out of a drunk’s mouth. There were some fallen-down outbuildings nearby and a tumbled-over rock well frame, and around the old well vines twisted and young saplings sprouted.
Trees were growing close to the house, and it appeared as if they were holding it up. An oak had erupted through rotten porch boards and was crawling up the front of the place, poking a limb through a glassless window frame, like a bully poking a big finger in a sissy’s eye. The house’s lumber had gone gray as cigarette ash. At one side, a persistent hickory had grown to the height of the house and was still growing, and in the process, one humongous limb was lifting a corner of the roof as if tipping a hat.
We carefully mounted the porch, watching our step as it protested our weight. A burst of birds exited a nearby window with a noisy flutter. I said, “Shit.”
“Just yellow-bellied finches,” Leonard said. “Not known man-eaters.”
The front door was still intact, but when I took hold of the rusted doorknob, it budged only slightly before jamming. The hinges were rusted tight.
The window from which the birds had exploded was our next bet. Leonard kicked out the few remaining fragments of glass and broke apart the wood trim that had held the glass in the frame, and we climbed inside.
The room was large and decorated with vines and dust and a peeling, bubbled wallpaper that had a faded design on it that must have been colorful and jim-dandy about 1928. There was an old fireplace filled with trash from hunter and/or hobo camps. A chicken snake, big enough to play a starring role in a Tarzan movie, slithered quickly across the floor and disappeared in a gap in the wood.
The first-floor ceiling was mostly gone, and you could clearly see the roof was pocked with holes, and the shadowed sunlight through the gaps was like spoiled cheese oozing through the splits in a food grater. The flooring was also gapped, and there were sections where it was bowed up and the boards had popped and split from weathering.
We made it across and into the next room without falling through, and the flooring there was better because the ceiling was complete and less water had dampened it. The room was smaller and contained an old-fashioned chifforobe. The wood of the chifforobe had swollen and cracked. There was a bird’s nest on top of it, and dried birdshit streaked its sides. The wallpaper here was good, and you could recognize the pattern as a series of pale
