The oversize, sprawling single-story brick house offered more than enough room for even Bagrat’s large family— two master suites, four additional bedrooms and two other full baths, a large, airy parlor, formal dining room, spacious kitchen with breakfast area and half bath, a roofed and screened redwood deck that ran the length of the house in the rear, attached two-car garage and utility room, and a den behind the kitchen with another full bath. Like all the other homes in the affluent area, the house had been custom-built and showed it. Rose fell in love with it on sight, and so Bagrat went ahead and signed the lease, shoving aside his strange presentiments and his questions as to why the house had had six owners in ten years, for nearly three years of which it had just sat vacant despite a burgeoning demand for quality housing in the suburban fringes of the rapidly growing city of Richmond.
He and his family had been living in the house for a month or so when the next-door neighbor, a medium-level executive with Reynolds Metals Company, asked—in what Bagrat took to be a most peculiar tone—if he or his wife or children had found aught to dislike about the new home. However, when Bagrat tried to pin him down to specifics, the man would only mutter something about one of the rooms being hard to heat and quickly changed the subject.
This incident flashed back into his mind when, one night soon after. Rose happened to stumble against a wall getting out of the shower and remarked that that wall— which wall separated the front master suite from the bedroom of their youngest daughter, Karen—was icy cold and wondered aloud if something had gone wrong with the heat register in that room and if the child had enough blankets.
When she and Bagrat entered the child’s bedroom, it was definitely colder than the rest of the house by ten or fifteen degrees, for all that the register was faithfully performing its function. Moreover, five-year-old Karen was wide awake, huddled under her covers and shivering. With her usual directness, she explained the phenomenon.
“It’s the little pale lady. Mama—every time she comes it gets real cold in here.”
Further patient questioning got matter-of-fact I y yet rather unbelievable answers from the usually truthful child. “She’s a grownup lady. Mama, you can tell that because she never has any clothes on, but she’s small for a grownup, not much bigger than Auntie Perous, at the church.” The old woman of whom she spoke was, Bagrat figured, less than five feet tall by two or three inches. “She never says anything, even when her lips move, but I think she’s sad most of the time, she just looks sad, even when she’s smiling. She visits me a lot, sometimes in the days, but usually at night.”
Bagrat and Rose did not know whether to believe the child’s wild, fantastic story or not. Nonetheless, she was brought in to sleep with them in the front master suite the rest of that night, and by the next night, they had made other arrangements, giving their eldest son, Al. the den behind the kitchen as a bedroom and moving Karen into the room thus vacated. Her sometime bedroom was converted into a sewing room for Rose and their eldest daughter, Charlene. This rearrangement worked for almost a week.
CHAPTER
THE SECOND
Rupen and a couple of warehousemen were checking bills of lading against crates of rifles when Bagrat came into the warehouse at a dead run. gripped Rupen’s arm in a viselike hold, and gasped, “Come on! We got to get out of my house, right away. Rose just called.”
In the car, on the way out, Bagrat talked while Rupen drove. “So after ever’thing that went down, I started asking some questions all around that neighborhood, see. That house was built eleven years ago by one of the best contractors in the whole frigging town for a Jew dentist and his wife, but they hadn’t lived in it even a year when they drove their car into Upham Creek one New Year’s, coming home drunk, and both of them was killed.
“Seems she, the wife, didn’t have no people close, and so ever’thing went to his mother—insurance money, cars, house, furniture, ever’thing—the old lady sold ever’thing but just the house and the furniture, and just before she went over to spend twelve, fourteen months in Israel, she advertised the house and rented it out for a year’s lease to a man and what she thought then was his wife and his two servants. But no sooner was she out over the Atlantic on El Al than the man she’d rented to moved in with his mistress and five other guys that sold for him.
“The older neighbors say those bastards threw nonstop parties, real orgies, bringing carloads of booze and beer and women in for ’em.
“They say some of the people was neighbors, back then, took that bunch up on invites and went over to some of the first parties, but after a while, wouldn’t none of the neighbors go near the place, what with the fights and the public fucking—one old feller told me about two of them, nekkid as jaybirds, was playing sixty-nine out in the backyard on a fucking picnic table, oncet! Him and his wife and boy all seen the shameless bastard and his hussy, and that’s why to this day they got that old high, thick privet hedge on the property line, he says. And the mean, common things they done to people as passed out at their parties!
“Then, almost to the end of their lease, they had a party one weekend and brought in a bunch of girls from some state civil service picnic. That party was a bloody mess. I hear—coupla guys was hurt real bad in fights, and then one of the girls they’d done brought in was raped, too. The guys done it to her hurt her real bad, then just left her and she bled to death in a bed in that same room we had Karen in! And the old guy I talked to said when the county coroner’s guys brought the body out, it could’ve been a ten- or twelve-year-old kid. that’s how small it was.”
Rupen sighed. “Bagrat, when did you hear all this gossip?”
“Yesterday afternoon and evening, Rupen. That’s when I finally caught the old guy, Harry Conyers, home,” Bagrat replied.
“And you hotfooted it right home and told it all to Rose. I’ll bet,” said Rupen, an edge of sarcasm in his voice.
“No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t,” answered Bagrat, adding, “I meant to, but when I got back home, Al and Haighie and Arsen were all on the deck and Arsen had his oud and I started playing a dumbeg and we just kept it up until Rose came out and called us in for chow and I sort of forgot it until she was asleep.
“That’s part of what threw me so bad when she called
today, Rupen. The old guy said that the little bitty woman was raped and killed had the prettiest blue-black long hair he’d ever seen, real shiny-like . . . and that’s pretty much what Rose said, too.”
Rose was at the house two doors from hers, being alcoholically entertained by Mrs. loanna Vitolis, who had lived in the house for nearly twelve years. But even with a good quarter of a liter of ouzo in her. Rose would not consider setting foot back in her own house. Still pale and trembling, with a look of sick horror in her eyes, she told her husband and brother-in-law what had happened late that morning.
“I’d gotten the kids all off to school and cleaned up and all, and about ten-thirty, I set up the sewing machine and started hemming a skirt for Charlene. It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes after I’d heard the clock strike eleven that I heard … no, not really heard, just felt that somebody was waiting to speak to me but didn’t want to interrupt me, kind of feeling. And I noticed then that even with the sunlight streaming into the window, it had gotten real cold in that room. too.
“I turned around and . . . and she was just standing there and staring at me! She wasn’t five feet tall and white as milk, with black eyes and thick black hair that hung down below her waist, and she was naked, with blood smeared on her thighs and more streaks of blood that had run down from out of terrible bite marks on her tiny breasts and her shoulders and her throat, and it looked like one of her nipples had been bitten right off.
“Her face was cut in a couple of places and bruised real bad, and her lips were moving like she was talking or trying to, but there was no sound. I just sat there for a minute, I guess, just staring at her. But when her face and head all of a sudden turned into a skull with eyes, I just left the machine running and took off out the room door and out the front door and I guess I’d still be running if loanna here hadn’t seen me and run after me and caught me and brought me back to here.