Rick Shelley: Son of the Hero

I wasn't sure that I had enough cash to pay for the cab ride. I'd never expected to need a taxi. My folks had planned to meet me at the airport, the way they normally did when I came home from college. This time, I was coming home for my last spring vacation. In another six weeks I would have my B.S. in computer science. I was also coming home to celebrate my twenty-first birthday. Dad had promised something unusual for my "coming of age"-not my eighteenth birthday when I could vote and all, but number twenty-one. Dad wouldn't say what he had in mind, just that he wasn't being old-fashioned about twenty-one being "of age." I was a little edgy about the surprise. The one he'd hit me with when I turned eighteen was unusual enough. He dumped me in the Colorado Rockies with a light backpack and a few essentials and told me that I had three days to cover fifty miles of rough mountainous forest. He would meet me on the other side. But then, Dad was always a little strange. For years I worried that he was completely loony. Some of his habits were hard to accept as rational. And Mom wasn't a whole lot better. But it was a fun kind of crazy, and I guess I had a better childhood than most kids I knew. Even being dumped out in the wilderness wasn't that rough. Dad and I had done a lot of camping, and I knew how to take care of myself. Dad called it a test. I passed without much trouble, even enjoyed it.

"Here you are, kid," the cabbie said when we pulled up to the curb in front of the house. "That'll be twenty-fifty."

Searching for the money and worrying that I might not have that much on me kept me from getting too upset at being called a "kid." I even had to give him the ten quarters I had left from the video arcade at O'Hare. There was nothing left for a tip-but then, I wouldn't have tipped anyone who called me "kid" on my twenty-first birthday anyway. I got my suitcase and overnight bag out and shut the door. The cabbie screeched away to let me know how he felt about not getting a tip.

I stood out front and looked at the only home I had ever known. It looked old-fashioned and was. Even when the house was new it must have looked out of place, out of time-limestone blocks in a development of brick, wood, and aluminum; two stories with high-peaked roof and gables among ranchers; nearly hidden behind a stone wall and thick bushes instead of neat white picket or chain-link fencing with sparse, carefully manicured landscaping. Dad had designed the place. He liked to say that it was sometimes worth being different just to be different. From the street, the house was almost hidden. Twelve-foot privet hedges surrounded it. Windows peeped out. Thick ivy clung to the walls. The walk curved back and forth through two decades of transplanted Christmas trees. Lilacs bloomed everywhere, giving the place an overwhelming sweetness for a few weeks every spring. -Home.

I carried my bags toward the front door slowly, savoring the lilacs and the feeling of being home. The house sits 120 feet from the road, and the ground rises five feet from curb to porch. Ten acres of land-most of it looks wild, though there was reason, rationale, behind the layout… at least Dad claimed there was.

No one came out to greet me, but I didn't start to worry until I saw three newspapers on the porch. Three days' papers. Both locks on the front door were locked. When I opened the door, I had to push a stack of mail out of the way.

"Mom? Dad?" I didn't get any answer. I brought the papers in, set them and the mail on the little table in the entryway. I headed for the kitchen then, my mother's private kingdom. There were no dirty dishes piled up. There was also no birthday cake waiting. The milk in the fridge smelled sour. A package of hamburger had turned a peculiar gray color. A quick tour told me that there was no one in the house but me. The search was a frenzied formality. After seeing what was in the fridge, I knew that no one else was home. But both cars were in the garage.

It was time to start worrying.

I went through the house again, more slowly, more carefully, looking for notes. There was nothing in the living room, dining room, or kitchen-places Mom was likely to leave word. Nor was there anything in Dad's office or in any of the bedrooms or bathrooms upstairs. I even unraveled a couple of feet off every roll of toilet paper looking for a message. I know that sounds crazy, but in my family, it's not enough to merely be logical.

That left the garage, basement, and yard. I checked the garage first. I looked through Dad's Citroen and Mom's Dodge van, and then under them. Nothing. The yard-all ten acres-would need hours to search thoroughly; it's not as though we just had grass and a few tame trees-it's a jungle out there. So I headed for the basement.

The cellar was always taboo for me while I was growing up. The door leading down from the kitchen was always locked. On the few occasions when I was allowed down there, it was to get something out of the larger of the two cellar rooms. The smaller room was Dad's private preserve, and I was never allowed into it. Well, when I was very young, before I started school, there may have been a few times when I went in there with Mom and Dad, but those memories were impossibly vague, connected somehow to memories of visits to relatives.

The door leading from the kitchen down to the cellar was unlocked. I turned on the lights and went down the steps-slowly. My stomach started to churn. I hesitated and wondered if I should call the police. I decided to wait until I finished my search. There were some other calls I could make too-back to the dorm to see if a letter had come for me, to Dad's agent and a couple of people my folks sometimes did things with. I didn't think that the calls would do any good, though, not with both cars in the garage, rotten food in the fridge, no note, and the pile of papers and mail. My folks were much too organized for that.

The main part of the basement-furnace, central air, water heater, an old sofa and chair that had been exiled when I was ten, three bicycles (my "wheels" from ages seven to fifteen), and other odds and ends you might find in any cellar-was as I remembered it. Back in the farthest corner, the door to my father's sanctum sanctorum was propped open with the snow shovel. I stopped at the bottom of the stairs and stared at that open door, reluctant to cross the cellar and look inside that room. I was afraid of what I might find. That door was always secured by two combination locks and a heavy deadbolt.

I held my breath and listened to silence for a couple of minutes, crazy fears racing through my mind. Had someone broken in and killed them? Had they run off on my twenty-first birthday? Murder-suicide? Was the old man really as crazy as I sometimes thought he was?

After a long hesitation, I walked slowly toward the open door, wishing I had a weapon. I stopped at the door and reached inside for the light switch. It took a bit of fumbling. The switch was set farther from the door than the rest of the switches in the house.

Bright light. Nothing jumped out. I looked in, then stepped inside… maybe with my jaw hanging open.

The Room. There were swords, knives, maces, shields, pennants, and other medieval goodies hanging on the walls. A suit of chain mail was arranged on a dummy in one corner. There was a huge rolltop desk and a work-table in the center of the room. I saw a pile of stuff on the table with several sheets of my mother's lilac-colored-and-scented stationery on top, but I didn't run right for that. I was, momentarily, flabbergasted at what else the room held-seven extra doors spaced around the four walls. Two doors flanked the door I had entered through, on the wall between Dad's room and the rest of the basement, doors that weren't there on the other side. I shook my head, almost forgetting the search that had brought me to the room. The weaponry was no surprise. There was more of that all over the house. But those doors! Then I went to the table and picked up mother's stationery.