of rice, reception at the Fort Jude Club. There were mug shots with announcements of each new job – Bradley J. Kalen, second V.P., Bradley J. Kalen, publicist, Bradley J. Kalen, representative – about two a year until they stopped. Bradley J. Kalen, unemployed? Divorce notice buried in City Briefs: irreconcilable differences, one of those legal niceties constructed to protect the perp. Drunk driving arrests starting in high school, ongoing. Assault, probably bar fights, ongoing. Charges filed, charges dropped. Oh, fuck. It better not be him.
Sitting there in the library, a.k.a. morgue of the Star, he could not have told you whether he came in to research the whole human torch thing because it was a good story or because of the newspaper photo that Lucy ripped out of his hands when he was five years old. It may be a message too.
Dan still doesn’t know why she kept it, but that’s not the worst thing he doesn’t know. What is it with that house? Yesterday something happened to him in the old woman’s stifling bedroom and for longer than he can say, life as he knows it stopped dead. Hallucination or fever dream? He doesn’t know. She came boiling into his head, ugly and raw and raging over something that he sure as hell didn’t do. Wherever she is in time, she smacked into him again today. While he was in the attic with Steffy, he was OK. He was OK talking to her boyfriend Carter. He was OK starting downstairs. Then outside her bedroom, she crashed into his head again roaring, Not him. Never. Do you hear? The words scorched, driving him out of the house a fraction of a second too late. There in the hallway, hot as a branding iron he can still feel, she marked him:
It’s in the blood.
Things we think of to say after the moment for that pissed-off, snappy comeback evaporates: Chill, lady. You’re just a story. If that’s the way you feel about it, then fuck you.
In a day centered on searching, why did he save his mother for last? Achievement, achievement, achievement, high school P.R. boilerplate with a head shot of Lucy Carteret smiling like any pretty girl. Then, three grafs under a mug shot. Local Girl Wins Radcliffe Scholarship. Radcliffe?
One of those things about his mother that she never told. Lucy loved talking to him, she’d say anything, but when he asked her about her life before him, when he asked her about anything in it, she shut down. He always thought she was smarter than he was; he knew she’d dropped out of college. He never knew which one, or why she quit. A Star staffer wrote the scholarship story. It ended:
‘Daughter of the late Lorna Carteret of this city and the late William Carteret of Charleston, S.C., the FJHS senior lives with her grandmother, Mrs Lorna Archambault at 4343 Azalea Street.’
This is how Dan Carteret, a good reporter in normal times, ran head-on into the detail he did not know he was avoiding. Like a crash test dummy in a high-speed experiment, he hit the wall. Something inside him went splat!
No wonder he couldn’t get out of that house fast enough. No wonder Lucy kept the tearsheet from the Star. No wonder he didn’t know – and after he knew, which he freely admits, now that he is up against it, he didn’t want to know. The ruined foot. The chair. Images long burned into his brain expanded and magnified until they filled the world. Directly related to him.
Fuck, she was his great-grandmother. It’s in the blood.
All this unexplained fire and probable damnation is specific to him.
The discovery drove him boiling out into the twilight, to the rented Honda and the note on the windshield. A demon in his head is busy writing background music for what lies ahead: possible scoring for the Greek Recognition Scene.
DON’T BE HERE
DON’T DO THIS
IT ISN’T SAFE.
Fuck. He has to source the note.
32
The Lunch Bunch
There’s nothing like a good fire to bring out all your best friends. It’s ghoulish but true, it’s a fantastic bonding time. Thank God nobody was hurt.
Most of us went to bed early – imagine, on a Saturday night, but it was the day after the biggest bash of the year and the Kalen party wiped us out! We went to the Colemans’ for cocktails about Kara’s brother from Detroit but it was a done deal; since we were getting over Friday night, we’d be at Kara’s all dressed