The Good Demon Page 13

  Now all I had to do was wait for him to name a boon. But what would it be? Probably something trivial and strange, like in a fairy story. What did magic folks ever want? A rose, a pearl, a gold doubloon, something to remember me by? Gaspar wasn’t evil, because why would She send me to someone evil? It’s not like he’d ask for my soul or something. At worst, he’d probably take my voice, like in The Little Mermaid. I’d give up my voice for Her, no problem. She was about the only person I wanted to talk to anyway.

  Lying there, feeling all happy inside, I looked over and saw Kevin’s notebook sitting there on my bedside table. I’d taken it out late last night to read over again, to gaze at the drawings. I started thinking about how happy I was, and how that maybe wasn’t quite fair. Gaspar seemed so sad when he spoke of Kevin, how much he had loved him, what a talented artist he was. It was true, Kevin was a genius. Even now, as I traced my fingers over his drawings, I got a chill from them, like they could evoke something hidden in me, like they were some kind of magic all their own.

  Maybe it wasn’t right that I have this notebook. It didn’t exactly belong to me. I thought back to how I’d stolen it along with the rosewood box, stolen it from poor Uncle Mike of all people. I started to feel pretty shitty about the whole thing. I remembered that article I found about Kevin. Didn’t it say something about his mom and dad being alive? Maybe they were still around. They might like to have this notebook. I know I would if Kevin were my son.

  It was settled then. In the last few days before I got Her back, I was going to track down Kevin Henrikson’s parents.

  After Mom and Larry went to work, I took Mom’s car over to the library and made a beeline for Mrs. Jenkins’s desk. She fiddled with her glasses and squinted at me.

  “What’ll it be today?” she said. “Horror movies or the news?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “You said it, honey.”

  She led me back to the research room, to the computer with all the old newspapers on it.

  “Glad somebody’s getting some use out of the past,” she said. “Lord knows you’re the only one.”

  I found the article about Kevin’s death again. It gave me his parents’ names, and this time I was smart enough to copy them down. After a quick search of the obituaries I found out his mother, Irna, had died ten years after her son, but it seemed like Kevin’s dad was still around.

  The whole time I was researching, I felt the Wish House spirit watching me, curious. I could feel it reading over my shoulder, same as you can when anyone does that. It just about drove me crazy. Just because it’s a spirit doing it doesn’t make it any less annoying.

  I spent the next hour digging for Kevin’s father, Willie Henrikson. I got one phone number, and then another one. I found an old employer of his, an auto parts shop that hadn’t gone corporate yet. An old man answered. I had to chat him up for a while, asking about Willie, dodging all kinds of questions for why I needed to talk to him. But eventually I wound up with an address.

  It was only a little after noon, so I still had plenty of time. I grabbed a couple of videos I had on hold and left.

  Mr. Henrikson was at a nursing home called the Country Place. Nursing homes were all named stupid stuff like that. I’d been to a couple while Larry’s mom was still around. They all look the same on the inside, too. The same pee-yellow walls, the cafeteria-tile floors. The old folks were scattered in strategic armchairs, widows in walkers leaned against doorways, a motionless old man or two parked in a wheelchair around each corner like props in a Halloween spook house. It was scary to think that one day I’d end up in this kind of place, and that was only if I was lucky and lived a real long time. Life could seem pretty shitty if you took the long view of it.

  I told the nurse at the front desk that I was Mr. Henrikson’s grandniece. She cocked an eye up at that, but she let me on through. I tried to look as innocent as possible. I wore an oversize T-shirt from the ’80s with a pink elephant on it and my jeans with the least amount of holes. Also, I had my backpack with Kevin’s notebook in it.

  “He’s in there,” she said. “Don’t let him bite you on the way out.”

  I walked into a standard nursing home room, tacky furniture and off-white walls, a TV hanging crookedly from a wall mount. A curtain was drawn halfway across the space, separating it into two rooms. A TV on the other side of the curtain blasted Judge Judy at a painful volume. That was fine, that would give us the closest thing to privacy possible.

  Mr. Henrikson lay in one of those electronic beds that sits up so the person can watch TV, though he had his on mute with subtitles. I wondered if it was because of all the racket on the other side. The spirit followed me in, but it kept its distance, like it was afraid of being seen in here. It made me wonder about old folks, if maybe they had better eyes for spirits since they were closer to death. I’d have to ask Miss Mathis about it someday if I could manage to do it without pissing her off.

  “Hello there, little lady,” said Mr. Henrikson. “What can I do you for?”

  I tried to smile but it came out a grimace. I hated it when old men talked that shit to me.

  “Hi, Mr. Henrikson. I wanted to know if I could ask you a couple of questions.”

  “It’s Willie to you, darlin’. Why don’t you pull up a chair and ask me anything your little heart desires?”

  “I’ll stand.”

  I hadn’t quite thought this through. I just barged in on an old man in a nursing home and I was fixing to bug him about his only son’s horrific death. All of a sudden this maybe didn’t seem like such a good idea. I brushed my hair out of my face and realized my forehead was sweaty. I figured I should just go ahead and spit it out.

  “It’s about . . . um . . . Sir, was Kevin Henrikson your son?”

  Mr. Henrikson’s eyes went narrow and he looked like he wanted to pop me across the face.

  “Yeah, he was my boy. What about it?”

  “Well, I was just wondering about him. See, I found this notebook of his.”

  I pulled the notebook out of the backpack and held it toward him.

  “Let me see that,” he said, snatching it from my hands. “Christ, I ain’t seen this thing for years. Hell, I didn’t even know it existed until after Kevin was gone. A young lady came and found it for us. This was about a year after Kevin passed, mind you.”

  “A young lady found it?”

  “A girl was what she was. Real pretty, dark hair like yours. She said she had a dream about Kevin, that he had left something for us to find. I got mad at first. I don’t much go into that spiritual mumbo jumbo, dreams and the like. I’m a Baptist.”

  The girl had to be Cléa. That’s how she got the notebook.

  “Wouldn’t have let her in the house if it was up to me. But Irna—that was my wife—she told me to calm down, that I was being rude, and would the girl like a Coke? And I figured if somebody had to come creeping around after my boy, at least it was a pretty little thing like that. I know how that makes me sound, but I figure I ain’t got more than a couple years left in me, so the hell do I care what people think?”

  I said that was a good way to be.

  “No, it ain’t,” he said. “Just means there ain’t much left they hadn’t already took away, you understand? Now listen. The girl just walks right upstairs to Kevin’s room, same as if she’d been there a thousand times. She opens the door, waltzes over to his bed, and just climbs on up it. I’m about to shoo her down, tell her she’s being damn disrespectful, but she whips a screwdriver out from her belt and sets to work on the air vent. I figure I got a crazy person in my house, but hell, it ain’t the first time. Not if you know anything about that boy of mine. Girl unscrews the vent and pulls this here notebook out like some kind of prize egg on an Easter hunt.”

  “Did you read it?” I said.

  “Sure I read it. To my shame I read it. I knew the boy was crazy, but I didn’t know quite how bad it had gotten. I wasn’t a good dad, not by any stretch, but I wasn’t th
e worst.” He shook his head. “Irna, though, bless her heart. She just kept staring at the pictures, all them drawings he did. She kept saying, ‘My poor boy, we didn’t know.’ ‘Didn’t know what?’ I asked. ‘That he was an artist,’ she said. ‘That he was special.’ Special, my foot. He was my boy, but he was strange, and we never did get along too well.”

  I felt like I had to stick up for Kevin. Even if his writing was odd and his drawings were eerie, they were his own, and to me they were beautiful.

  “I think the notebook is amazing,” I said. “Especially the drawings.”

  “Whatever you say, darlin’. If Irna was here, she’d probably get all teary-eyed and offer you a Coke as well. But Irna’s dead, ain’t she? Anyways, the girl asked me if she could take it. I said sure, go right ahead. Kevin was gone by then. I didn’t need anything else to remember him by.”

  Mr. Henrikson’s scowl deepened then, wrinkles gouging his whole forehead in anguish, like a stirred-up river in a summer storm.

  “But Irna, no, she didn’t want to part with the notebook. She hugged it close to her and said it was all she had left of the boy. That’s when this girl—Christ, for the life of me I cannot remember her name—squatted down to where Irna sat and looked her dead in the eyes, and then she spoke. I remember her voice then, real gentle and calm, so in control of everything. It was spooky-like. I could have listened to her talk for years.”

  “What did she say?”

  Mr. Henrikson’s eyes glazed over. I could tell this hurt him, I could tell he was about to cry.

  “She said, ‘Ma’am, I’m going to get the people that did this to your boy. I’m going to stop them from ever hurting anyone again.’ I remember it same as it was yesterday. And Irna cried and said, ‘Okay, honey, do what you got to do.’ And the girl took the notebook and left and I never seen her again.”

  He was quiet a moment after that. The TV blared, strange instruments beeped and buzzed, the disinfectant and body-odor fug of the place filled the room. I was suddenly afraid. I felt the watchful spirit creep closer to me, hidden away among the shadows, and I shivered.

  “Mr. Henrikson,” I said, “what do you think happened to Kevin?”

  “I think he died, that’s what I think.” He tried to sit up, coughed, and lay back down. “Now, look here. I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but there ain’t any good to come from digging all this up.”

  “Was there something, I don’t know, strange about Kevin’s death?”

  It was hard to find the words to talk about this, standing there next to his bedridden father. Things were always more difficult when you had to face them in person.

  “Listen, honey, Kevin was missing for years before he got killed,” he said.

  “Missing?” I said. “I don’t understand.”

  “Kevin ran away,” he said. “Left a damn note and everything. We didn’t know where he was or what happened to him. I figured Kevin was dead years before he turned back up. But Irna, she held on. Think when they found him like that, that’s what finally did her in, rest her soul.”

  I didn’t want to ask this next part, but I knew I had to. I had to find out the truth about Kevin. I realized that now. He was the only person who could have understood me. I owed him that much.

  “Mr. Henrikson, do you think it had something to do with the man in the woods, like it said in the notebook?”

  “Man in the woods, nothing,” said Mr. Henrikson. “It was goddamn Luther Simpkins.”

  “As in Mayor Luther Simpkins?”

  Luther Simpkins was big news. He was the mayor for about a billion years, even when I was a girl. I remember his face on the billboards, a skinny grinning man with perfect silver hair. Half the town was named after him and his family.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “What in the world would the mayor want with your son?”

  “That’s the million-dollar question, ain’t it?” said Mr. Henrikson. “See, that girl’s visit got me to thinking. When Kevin died, the police wouldn’t let me see his body, said it was too mangled. Only let me look at his face to identify him, if you can believe that. I wanted an open-casket funeral—I wanted to bury my boy right. Authorities wouldn’t let me. Flat wouldn’t let me touch him. About a year later, I started wondering if there wasn’t something else to it. So I started asking around myself, you know, see what I can figure out. And what I figured out was the Paradise Society.”

  He said those words all mysterious-like, as if I was supposed to know what that meant.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Is that some kind of club?”

  “It’s devil worship is what it is,” said Mr. Henrikson. “Look, you weren’t even alive yet when all this stuff was happening. There were rumors about this town since the beginning. Folks wearing robes in the graveyard, drinking blood, doing all that satanic goat bullshit. But you never much believe it until it sneaks up and bites you on the ass. By then it’s too late. You look up and it’s all around you, been all around you since the day you were born.

  “The Paradise Society was what Luther Simpkins and all his cronies called themselves in private. They ran everything around here. Rich as hell, money as old as America. Supposed to be in some kind of cult. I always figured that was just jealous folks talking, like they do in a small town. But the more I looked into it, the more I started to find. Like how Luther Simpkins owned the whole damn police force, which is probably why they wouldn’t let me see my boy. How a Simpkins was in office ever since the founding of this town up until now. I heard talk of spooky stuff, a bunch of wild parties gone wrong. And that girl that found Kevin’s diary? Wound up seeing her face on a missing poster not long after. I called the police station about it to report her coming to see me.”

  “What did the police say?” I said.

  “That she was a runaway and it wasn’t any of my business. The next thing I know I’m fired off the worksite. Pretty soon no one’s talking to me anymore, much less answering my questions. I start drinking, a few years later my wife passes, and now I know I got to sell the house. And my life’s been one long stretch of skid-marks since.”

  Mr. Henrikson motioned toward the curtain, the TV squawking on the other side of it. He seemed so tired, so old and beat down. I hated to bother him more, but my mind still spun wild with questions.

  “Is there anything else you can tell me, Mr. Henrikson? Anything at all?”

  “Watch your back. Those people are ruthless, and they don’t take kindly to others poking in on their business. They won’t kill you, nothing like that. They won’t have to. When half of the town is owned by a handful of people with power, those folks can do whatever they want.”

  “How come I’ve never heard about any of this?” I said. “Wouldn’t someone have exposed them by now?”

  “What, you going to read about it in the newspaper? The Simpkins family owns the newspaper. Besides, it’s all gone quiet since Kevin’s time. You seen Luther Simpkins walking around town lately? Man’s been shut up in his house for years. I used to see him in the grocery store and the old bastard would wink at me. Made me want to gouge his eyes out.”

  It was true, I used to see Luther Simpkins on TV all the time when I was a kid. Ribbon cuttings at the new hospital, endorsing some candidate or other. But that was years ago. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen his face anywhere. Maybe that was why Larry always bitched about him being gone. I always just figured he was getting old, probably turned into some kind of PR risk. Maybe something had actually happened to him.

  “Thanks, Mr. Henrikson,” I said. “For talking to me and all. I know it must be hard on you.”

  “Shit,” he said. “Nothing’s harder on me than just staying alive. And I’ve done plenty of that already. It’s time for me to go now. Thanks for letting me get some of that off my chest.” He handed the notebook back to me. “I don’t want it. There ain’t a thing I can do with it. It’s better off in the hands of somebody like you.”

  Mr. Henrikson’s eyes met
mine, and for a second I thought he was going to cry.

  “Thanks for giving a shit about my boy,” he said.

  I nodded at him. He lay back on his bed and plugged his ears with his fingers, as if to block out the TV sound and everything else.

  And that’s how I left him.

  I drove home quick as I could. Mom would be back any minute, and I didn’t have time to visit the Simpkins mansion. I didn’t even have time to stop at the library to search the newspapers for the Paradise Society. That was probably a good thing, since Mr. Henrikson had given me more than my brain could process already. I mean, Luther Simpkins was a legend in our town. My stepdad Larry talked about him all the time.

  “If only we had Mayor Simpkins again,” he would say. “That was a man who knew how government worked. He didn’t let the federal bureaucracy push him around. He knew how to keep Big Government out.”

  I always ignored him. Larry’s political views were about the least interesting thing in the world to me, and as far as I was concerned, our town had always been a piece-of-shit place and the Simpkins family were there from the beginning. Everybody knew they were the richest folks in the whole town. I’d heard kids at school talk about how the Simpkins mansion was haunted, how they had snuck past the gates and seen weird things, but I always figured they were lying, trying to out-tough each other. I knew Luther had a daughter that Mom and I used to see out in town when I was a kid, but come to think of it, I hadn’t seen her around in ages either. She supposedly lived in that big house with him. The mom died a long time back. It was like the whole Simpkins clan had gone reclusive, holed up in that mansion away from the world.

  I made it home just before Mom and Larry got back. It felt bad inside. There was a heaviness to the air, something that made it hard for me to breathe. I started feeling pretty low, that Wish House spirit gazing close at me whenever I was alone. It whisked around my house, peeking in on Mom and Larry, sat itself down in the empty chair during dinner, watching us eat.

  Keep the focus, Clare, I told myself. You’re so close to getting Her back. Everything is going to be just fine.