Michael Collings - The Slab

Nothing happened to change his mind until after he had finished a walk-through of the house and the sorely neglected backyard. On the whole, he liked what he saw, liked especially the potential in the way the place was set on the property, the sense of roominess and openness. It kind of reminded him of Nevada…only green. Yes, there was a lot a good green thumb could do in the yard, and the house was larger than he had figured on getting for his money.

By the time he had finished with the showing, his mind was almost made up.

The realtor had three locks to check before leaving, so while she was finishing, Abe walked a short way down the front sidewalk, primarily to get a better view of the lot as a whole.

“That’s a death-house!”

His head jerked around sharply at the hoarsely whispered sound. For a moment, it was as if the voice had come from thin air, a disembodied sound that echoed strangely across the open yards. Then, squinting against the bright light, he finally spotted an woman next door, huddling in the shadow of a garage bearing the number 1042 in cracked wood cutouts desperately in need of a new paint job. She was staring directly at him.

He glanced over his shoulder. The realtor had just completed locking up and emerged from the shadow beneath the eaves of 1066 into the sunlight to join him.

“It’s a murder house,” the woman continued as if there had been no seconds-long interruption.

Abe could make out no details of her face-it was little more than a pale oval in the shadows. She was a large woman, almost grossly large, although that sense might have been due largely to the play of light and dark across her figure. He had the sense as well that she was old, perhaps ancient. In other times she might have passed for a witch, or at least a hag, given the vehemence-and distinct if perverse pleasure-that echoed through her voice.

She did not speak again right away but simply hunched there, seemingly oblivious to the look of pained annoyance that flitted across the realtor’s face in the split second it took for her to take in the scene, cross the remaining yards of sidewalk, slip her arm into Abraham’s and ease him back toward the car.

“People die in that house,” the old woman called after him from the shadows. He realized with an odd pang that had never seen her face clearly. Her cracked, warbling voice was eerily strained, as if she simultaneously wanted to yell out a warning and was afraid to raise her voice above a raspy whisper.

“They die.”

He glanced over his shoulder once more, just in time to catch a muted shimmer of yellow polyester pants as she disappeared around the corner of her garage.

At the car, he turned to face the realtor-a pretty young thing named Rebecca Cantwell, who was pretty enough and young enough that she should have been at home caring for her man and her little ones, not strutting around showing houses to old farts like himself. Not for the first time, Abraham Morris admitted to himself that he was indeed getting old. Everything he believed in and valued and knew to be inviolable and unalterable was shifting like sands beneath his feet. And lately the tide had been going out faster and faster. The reality of mortality struck him at that moment, as it had so often and so unexpectedly in the four years since Matty had died-struck him full in the face and for a moment he was blinded and made breathless by its power.

“Mr. Morris?” Rebecca asked, “are you all right? Do you want to sit down?”

“No, I’m fine.” He paused for a second to catch his breath. “Is it true?”

“Is what true, Mr. Morris?”

He was mildly amused to notice that she was lying to him…well, to be generous, not precisely lying, since she hadn’t exactly answered him, but she sure as hell didn’t want to talk about something.

Toying with him was perhaps closer. As if he wouldn’t notice when she turned the snow-job machine on full tilt.

“What that old woman was talking about,” he said patiently. Old indeed. Who knew, he might even have a decade or two on her. He couldn’t really tell, not with her hidden in the shadows like that.

“About this being a ‘death-house.’”

There was a long silence as Rebecca Cantwell rummaged through her purse for her car keys. Abe thought the movement curiously stereotyped, verging on deliberate. She’s stalling, he thought. Why?

The young realtor glanced up and saw him staring at her. She flushed embarrassedly and jerked the key ring out of the depths of her large bag.

“Uh…well,” she said, slipping the key into the door lock, “Uh, to be frank, Mr. Morris…”

Uh-oh, Abe thought. Here it comes. Beware realtors when they decide to “be frank.” He waited, not giving the woman any clues as to how she should proceed to save a once-sure sale that might suddenly be in jeopardy.

“There was…uh…some…unpleasantness here a couple of months ago.”

He opened his car door and slid in. He waited patiently while Rebecca fumbled with ignition and finally started the car. His glance was firm and his face unexpressive.

“The previous owner…a businessman here in the valley, respected, really an exceptional man. Uh, his stepson went…well, Mr. Morris, to be blunt, the kid flipped out completely.”

Behind the unmoving muscles of his face, Abe grinned at Cantwell’s lapse into slang.

Lost his marbles, his generation might have said, or wigged out, blew his gaskets. But the result would be the same, whatever you called it.

“The boy killed his stepfather?” he asked gently. “In the house?”

Cantwell looked momentarily surprised. “Yes, in the master bedroom. And his mother afterward. With a knife.”

Abe winced. That was a bit more than he had anticipated. “How old was he?”

“Fourteen or fifteen, I don’t remember exactly.” Her face was now pale, as if she were the senior citizen who needed to sit down and catch her breath before she fainted.

“What happened to him?”

“He’s dead, too.”

Abraham raised one eye brow quizzically.

“Not here,” the woman rushed to add. “Not in the house. He tried to get away in his stepfather’s car. It went off the road a couple of miles from here. There was…an explosion.”

Abe nodded. Then he turned slightly away from where the woman leaned against the door of her powder-blue Cadillac Eldorado, and he studied the house again. Not that the deaths made any difference, of course, not to him at least. It was a shame that things like that happened. The boy was probably on drugs or drunk and just couldn’t handle life. He had heard of such things before, although never quite this tragically. Three people dead. He shifted his position.

The house.

In spite of what might have happened inside a couple of months ago, the house was still a good buy. The inside had been completely renovated: new carpeting in every room; new hardwood doors hung in each room; new paint throughout.

He squinted against the bright sunlight. The mildly angled roof sloped down from each side of a central gable, giving the house a deceptive profile. It looked smaller, closer to the ground than it really was; the fourteen-foot, open-beam cathedral ceiling in the living room had surprised him, as had the fact there were five bedrooms. The place just didn’t look that large. From where he sat, he could see the crisp lines of white-rocked shingles. The roof was in good shape, he decided, and the exterior had recently been repainted as well.

The plants close to the house itself were all young-obviously newly planted. They weren’t doing all that well, but a spot of good fertilizer would fix that. Most of them would probably come out, anyway, since Abraham Morris had very definite ideas as to what was appropriate and not appropriate for front yards and flower beds. Roses, irises, gladiolus, geraniums-that sort of thing. Old fashioned cut flowers like Mattie so much enjoyed. He glanced disapprovingly at the straggling junipers and juvenile jade plants that promised nothing but unending, unchanging, year-round green.