Dead Ends Read online

  “Paul,” she said, by way of greeting, “you’re not at that house, are you? Catherine just told me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Get away from it. Get away from it now.”

  “Aunt Josie, I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “There are things worse than ghosts.”

  “It’s just a house.”

  She was silent for several seconds. “It sure ain’t a home. I won’t visit y’all there. It’s not a place for a Manning.”

  “Catherine and I need this place. It will be fine. Perfectly fine.” He got off the phone with pleasantries, and he thought of the stories he could tell inside these walls. He stared up at the ceiling with a surprising smile.

  Catherine and Paul ate at the nicest restaurant in Fort Sheldon, people at nearby tables smiling at the hometown girl made good, the Hollywood queen returned to them. No one was thinking about her drunkenness on a set or that her last three movies had bombed badly.

  Paul quietly pitched his fleshed-out vision for a TV show while they renovated the house. “We’d call the show The Catherine Manning Project.”

  “Like the house and I are both projects? I don’t want to be a project.”

  “You have to sell your own redemption story, babe. Just come with me to go see it. And see the possibilities.” He was reminded of when he’d first pitched a screenplay to her, the day they’d met. She’d optioned it on the spot. He knew how to make her want something.

  So Melody met them at the house, and let them wander the rooms. Catherine looked at the floors and the walls and the ceilings as though it was not her future house but a set.

  “It’s a thought,” she said. “But is it a good one?”

  “Yes. And with the backstory of your family...”

  “Ugh, we wouldn’t have to play up all that Manning versus Pallister stuff, would we? It doesn’t make me look great, does it?”

  “It’s called authenticity, sweetheart. Let your family history be your family history. No one can blame you for your ancestors. People will tune in. I think it’d be genius.”

  He added, “And if you didn’t like the house, we could sell it after the remodel. But I think you’ll like it. The house needs some happiness.”

  He knew which seeds to plant. And if she was a producer on the show, it might cover some of their investment in the remodel. After another hour she agreed, and he called her agent to start the wheels moving.

  That night, Melody went home and poured herself the good wine and thought, Thank God I found someone for that place. The perfect buyer.

  Six months later, and the renovations were done. The HGTV series—The Catherine Manning Project—had been the number-one show on the network the entire run. They’d done a crossover episode with SyFy Network’s Ghosts R Us, where the paranormal investigators claimed to be creeped out by the Pallister House (as they called it) but of course there was no evidence. Nothing appeared on their films, the odd noises a house made as part of its existence were amplified to invoke a mild shiver or two in the audience, and statements about “energy” and “presence” served to fill out the hour.

  “There is something here,” the clairvoyant blond cohost intoned dramatically, “and it seeks release.”

  Don’t we all, Paul thought, watching a rerun of the ghost-hunting episode on the couch with Catherine. It was strange to see the couch on the screen, inside the very house. “This doesn’t scare you, right?”

  She had a new script on her lap that a leading director had sent her, but she hadn’t begun reading it in earnest yet. Like it might vanish if she started. “The house feels so homey now. Almost like the show was filmed about someplace else. Not our home.”

  “I told you it would be fine.”

  “You always do. You always reassure me.” She stared down into her iced tea glass. “How’s the book coming?”

  He shifted slightly against her. “Fine.” He hadn’t gotten much writing done during the renovations. Now he should dive back into the novel, but it seemed a flaccid, uninteresting lump. He thought writing about the Pallisters and Mannings might make for a more interesting book than the one he’d been working on. But he wasn’t going to tell her that. Not yet. He kept thinking of the stories Melody had told him, the horrible tragedies of the Pallisters, and imagining them as scenes in a book or a film. That was what he should write.

  “I think I’ll go read this script upstairs,” she said. “I’m tired.”

  Finally, scripts were arriving for her to read. Her agent was in talks with directors. Hollywood wanted her again, her past sins and tanked movies forgiven in the wake of the suddenly hot TV show. He’d put her back on top. “Any good ones yet?”

  “Hopefully.” She kissed him on the cheek. “You coming up soon?”

  “Yes, in a few. You know I’m happy to read anything you want me to.” He was, after all, a writer. He knew story. She gave him a half-smile but she didn’t say, “Yes, please, honey, I’d love you to do that.” She never did. Like she didn’t trust his taste, or know what roles would suit her.

  Which was annoying when he’d known that the home renovation TV show was the perfect vessel for her. She didn’t appreciate him, he thought, and the idea of it was so alien and odd and unlike him that he nearly choked on his wine.

  She went upstairs, and he refilled his glass of Malbec from the nearly empty bottle on the kitchen island. She had told him she had no problem with him drinking in front of her, but he always felt guilty about it, since she’d stopped.

  He stood there, with his wine and his resentment, and he heard the soft whispers of men. Outside the window, in the front yard, which had been stripped of its thorns and vines and landscaped with flowers and shrubbery and a cool green lawn. Autograph seekers, maybe; there had been a number of them during the renovation show, and he’d hoped that would abate once the show was over. He went to the largest window facing out on the yard. He didn’t want to stand in the doorway and argue with them or ask them to leave. He’d count how many there were then call the police.

  In the yard, the moonlight hung like a screen, and a picture played against it. Two men, outlined in smoke, back to back, antique pistols in their hands, the spines meeting like two clouds merging, and then they started to walk away from each other, one of them staring at Paul with a face that could have been a brother of Catherine, turning, firing, the other man dropping, crawling toward the house, wounded, dying, vanishing as he crossed the entry steps.

  Then the shooter offering the coldest imaginable smile at Paul, and then vanishing.

  Paul blinked. He blinked again. He gave a soft little sigh of shock and moved his feet and heard the crunch of glass and looked down. Broken wineglass and spilled Malbec pooled around his shoes.

  The yard was night-empty, the moonlight a pale gleam.

  He looked where the first apparition—he didn’t know what to call it—had reached the house, but there was nothing there.

  Because, he told himself, there is nothing there. Just the house. It’s just a house. It’s not full of hate for the Mannings. Or for Catherine. That last thought drifted in, surprising him.

  He busied himself cleaning up the wine off the tiles and carefully gathering up the fragments of glass. Catherine liked to walk barefoot, and it wouldn’t do to leave shards where she could step. Halfway through he laughed at his own ridiculousness.

  This is the book you want to write, asserting itself. The scenes are simply coming to life in your mind. Your imagination is supercharged and ready to start. That’s all that was. Nothing more.

  He said nothing to Catherine.

  The house took hold of them; it stopped being just a TV project, just a grand mansion. It became home. At least for him. Catherine was spending far more time in New York and Los Angeles than he’d planned. But that was good; they each needed their work.

  He slept later than Catherine most days; she was an early riser, and she liked to jog around the property. He went into his study; it had been Hank Palliste
r’s study before, and before that his father, Adam—the family murderer. That thought unsettled him slightly, but it was a warm, homey space, with ample bookshelves and a window that overlooked the back acreage.

  On Hank’s shelf he’d found a thin book about the Mannings and the Pallisters, written twenty years ago and published by the local college’s press.

  And the author was Catherine’s own Aunt Josie. That was a shock. They’d invited her to the house several times, but she’d always declined. This morning, though, the sun was bright, and he decided to try her again. And to his surprise, Josie agreed to come over in an hour. He found himself tidying the house for her arrival; he remembered her initial opposition to them buying it.

  Catherine had gone to Los Angeles for the week. She had picked a script and a director; she hadn’t shared the script with him. It seemed such an odd, passive way to make him feel small. It did not occur to him that she might fear his sarcasm, or want to give such a performance that it wasn’t ruined for him by already having read the script. He only saw a pettiness.

  Aunt Josie arrived at the door. She was dressed in a denim skirt, a colorful blouse, and slippers. She walked with a cane. A college-age boy waited in the car—Paul recognized him as Josie’s great-grandson. When she waved at him, he drove off.

  “He’s going to meet his friends at Starbucks, and I’ll text him when we’re done. I love the texting, don’t you? So convenient.”

  “I’m so glad you could come, Aunt Josie.”

  “Well, I’m here,” she said, and she crossed the doorway into the house and took another deep breath. “I guess if Catherine’s been here for six months, it’s safe for me.”

  “Would you like some tea or coffee?”

  “Life is short. Do you have bourbon?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I do.”

  “You’re treating me like the guest of honor. I approve. I watched every episode of The Catherine Manning Project on the television, but I want the tour.”

  He obliged her. Josie nodded and didn’t frown at the modernizations they’d brought to the house. At the end, when they’d retired to the sunroom with their bourbons, she smiled at him and he felt an odd tension jar his bones, instead of relief. “You’ve changed so much in this house,” she said. “Yet nothing has changed at all.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “This place... you have to wonder how much hate lived here. The Pallisters, all that hate for the Mannings. It would ebb and flow, naturally, that’s how you’d find these détentes between the families, where a Manning and a Pallister would make peace long enough have a doomed romance or to go into an ill-fated business together... but mostly this was a bottle full of hate.”

  “The people who hated the Mannings are gone,” he said. “The hate died with them. This is a Manning house now.”

  “I don’t know that I would have brought a wife here,” she said. And then he saw her, as if for the first time: the hard edge of her jaw, the deepness of her wrinkles, the fierceness in her gaze. “You know, I was here right after Adam Pallister killed them. It was my daddy, Joseph Manning, who had the sour business deal with him. He wanted to talk to Adam, and he brought me along to play with Hank––Daddy thought he and Adam wouldn’t quarrel so much in front of kids. Door unlocked and we came inside. The blood... the blood was everywhere. Daddy made me wait outside. But I could see through the windows. Mrs. Pallister and the twins, lying on the floor… it was my daddy who found Hank hiding in the kitchen pantry.”

  “I had no idea. I’m so sorry.”

  She took a long sip of the bourbon. “He cut out their eyes, you know. His family. After he killed them and before he killed himself. Standing at that window, I could see their faces. I always wondered… what didn’t he want them to see?”

  Paul thought of the painting, with the Pallister eyes neatly clipped out. A vandal, echoing the legend. It was time to stop reminiscing.

  “Well, I hope you enjoyed the show and will be a frequent guest here at the house.”

  “I won’t,” Aunt Josie said, setting down her bourbon. “You did this for the TV show and the attention it garnered Catherine’s cleanup effort and career relaunch. Fine, you’ve gotten it. Sell the house.”

  “I like the house.”

  “You sure you don’t have Pallister blood in you?”

  “I’m not even from North Carolina.”

  She stared at him for several long beats. “Have you experienced anything unusual here?”

  He thought of the duelists in the yard, the dying ghost crawling toward him, the grinning victor. Just a scene he wanted to write, playing out in his imagination. “You mean ghosts?” he said. “Of course not.”

  “I mean echoes... hate echoing down through the years.”

  “I didn’t know you could see an echo.” He gave her an indulgent smile at her poor choice of words.

  “But the house sees you,” she said, and for one moment he wondered what it would be like to crush Aunt Josie’s fragile throat beneath his fingers. He could reach out and it would be over within a minute. He stuck his hands in his pocket, felt a flash of fever.

  “A house can’t see me. But I should save that line for my next book.”

  “I don’t mean to frighten you.”

  “You couldn’t,” he lied.

  That night he saw another chapter he’d been thinking about for the book, inspired by Melody’s stories, perhaps urged on by Josie’s comments about echoes that weren’t sounds but were images. The girl in the yard. The Manning girl, seized and brought against her will by the Pallister heir, laid across a shadow of a horse. She was made of smoke and light, and she wrenched free from the shadow of the Pallister; there was a flash, the gun firing, the Pallister falling, clutching at his ruined throat. Lifted by unseen hands, carried in the door.

  Paul didn’t run downstairs to see if the ghosts cavorted in the foyer. He knew they didn’t. They weren’t there. It was simply the book in his mind, trying to stir to life.

  So he sat down with his Clairefontaine notebook and began to write furiously. He wanted this on paper, not on computer, he wasn’t sure why. The words of the two scenes he’d imagined poured out of him. After an hour, his hand beginning to cramp, he looked with surprise at the last words he’d written.

  You brought a Manning here. You made me hers.

  It was almost like a whisper, he’d heard the words. Just his next book trying to work free, the long story of this house. He needed to write the book and stop daydreaming about its violent, tragic scenes. He’d never written a ghost story, but he could. Based here, drawing on her family history. Manning versus Pallister through the centuries. A follow-up that would be a bestseller, and Catherine could stop acting like she was their sole means of support.

  He scratched out the last line he’d written and he wrote, with a steady hand: A house cannot remember. A house cannot see. This is a ghost story without ghosts. Stop trying to scare yourself.

  “I think we should sell the house,” Catherine said, a week later. She had signed a deal on the script, which she still hadn’t shown him, was back in North Carolina briefly for Aunt Josie’s birthday, then would return to California. He’d spent the past week in the library here in Fort Sheldon, scribbling furiously in his notebook, leafing through local histories, looking deeper into the stories about the Mannings and the Pallisters, starting at the very settlement of Fort Sheldon.

  Because the ideas for the book kept playing out before his eyes. The Manning who survived the duel, his triumphant smile the clearest thing on his face. The Manning girl shooting her attacker, with resolve and cold nerve. The Manning boy standing outside the window, unexpected relief on his face as the Pallister girl died in childbirth. Smoky movies that played quickly, briefly, reflections in the windows. But not the final tragedy, the worst one, the massacre of the Pallisters by one of their own. His mind had spared him that, and he knew that it would be the final chapter he would write. He had started drawing the curtains and leaving
them shut, turning the house dark. And he wrote, bringing to life the biographical notes he’d made on the earliest Mannings and Pallisters. He thought it was the best stuff he’d ever written. Except for that one line in his notes: You brought a Manning here. You made me hers. Like he was going to give the house itself dialogue in the story. But he would stare at those words before he started to write each day, as if trying to find a scene where he could place them.

  Leave? Now? When he was doing his best work? A rage filled him, and he struggled to keep a calm, studied look on his face.

  “Are you not comfortable here?” he asked slowly.

  “Well, you always wanted this place more than me.”

  “This was to be our home,” he said. “I wanted it for you. This got your career back on track.”

  “You wanted it for the TV show. You ought to write a ghost story set here, what with all the old stories.” She said it like an afterthought, but he hated that she’d suggested the idea before he told her he was well under way writing that very book. He took refuge in a long sip of his wine.

  “Well, maybe I will.”

  “You get that book done by the time I’m done filming with Brice, and then we’ll sell it and be done with it.” She spoke as though her words weren’t small bombs landing on him.

  “Brice?”

  “Oh. Did I not tell you? Brice got the other lead role.” She seemed to study her fingernails, then crossed her arms, as if bored with the conversation.

  Brice had been an issue, long ago. He’d dated Catherine when they’d done her first very successful movie together, the one that had made her “that Catherine Manning” and won her the Oscar. There had a been a fling. There had been a highly public breakup, magazine covers, news crews from the entertainment shows, endless gossip. Then, on her next project, she’d met Paul when he pitched his script. But Brice always lurked in the back of their marriage, the lover played out on the magazine pages, her one famous boyfriend.