Starling House(110)
He watches Opal’s eyes drift slowly closed. He remembers how very tired he is, how long it’s been since he wasn’t tired.
Arthur Starling sleeps, and dreams good dreams.
EPILOGUE
This is the story of Starling House.
There are lots of stories about that house, of course. You’ve heard most of them. The one about the mad widow and her poor husband. The one about the miners who broke into Hell and the monsters at the center of a maze. You’ve even heard the one about the three bad men and the little girl who gave them their comeuppance, although nobody tells that one, not yet. (They will, I swear they will. I’ve broken a lot of promises, but not this one.)
This story is my favorite, because it’s the only one with a happy ending.
It usually starts when somebody mentions the power plant, or the fire last summer. Remember that night back in June, they say. First the motel burns, then the dam breaks.
Somebody else might mention the wreck by the old railroad bridge, or the string of out-of-towners that wound up in the hospital with strange injuries, or the way their dogs stared into the mist with their hackles high, not quite daring to bark.
Bad luck, I guess, someone says, and everybody nods, just like always.
Except it seemed like Eden’s bad luck was all used up in that single night. There was a bad spell right after, of course, and everybody worried about jobs. The ash pond flooded the power plant and took out the lights all the way to Nashville. They said you could see it from the International Space Station, a black stripe cut right out of the country.
But FEMA showed up quick enough, and power got diverted from someplace else. For a week or two the whole county was covered in government officials wearing plasticky suits, collecting groundwater samples, but when the tests came back they said it wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been. They said most of the spill flowed downhill and settled in a low spot. Big Jack, still hard at work, people said.
The out-of-towners got discharged from the county hospital and climbed into their sleek cars. They drove north, their expressions haunted but strangely vacant, as if they didn’t know what they were driving away from but didn’t dare slow down.
The mist rose once or twice more that summer, but it didn’t linger as long, and it didn’t leave new patches of rot and tragedy behind it. People said it smelled sweet, like wisteria, and left flowers blooming behind it. A woman on Riverside Road said she opened her kitchen door and found a luna moth stuck to the screen. She took a picture and showed anyone who asked and several who didn’t. Everyone leaned over her screen and admired it dutifully, the size of it, the pale green of the wings, like fox fire on a dark night.
Don Gravely gave a big interview to The Courier-Journal in July, assuring everyone that the expansion plans were still underway, that they would rebuild stronger and bigger than ever. Except in that very same issue there was an article about a lawsuit being brought against Gravely Power and a newly discovered will. That librarian woman from the eastern side of the state found it tucked in a Bible, Luke 15:32, in Leon Gravely’s own handwriting. Turned out Old Leon hadn’t willed the company and family fortune to his brother, after all, but to that no-good daughter of his. She was long gone, drowned on another one of those bad-luck nights, but her children were still living.
Except nobody could find them. The boy—what was his name? Jason? Jackson?—was rumored to be up in Louisville now, but his sister couldn’t be found. The woman who used to run the Garden of Eden Motel went around the whole town, banging on doors and having herself a good yell at anybody that held still long enough, but nobody’d seen Opal since that night. The constable told the former owner of the Garden of Eden Motel, as kindly as he could, that girls like that never came to good ends, and the former owner of the Garden of Eden invited him to say that again, louder. The constable declined.
Some people said the motel owner even went up to the Starling place and rattled the gates, hollering, but no one answered. She kicked the groceries that were piled at the end of the drive, spraying curdled milk across the road, and left.
Nobody had picked up the groceries in weeks, and the store manager finally stopped delivering them. The rumor was that the Starling boy ran off the night of the fire and the flood, disappeared or maybe died. No one could say for sure, but it was true that there were no more lights seen flickering through the trees.
The house sat still and empty all that summer. Shingles littered the lawn, and the grass grew lavishly long, lying over itself in deep green drifts. Wildflowers straggled over the walls, wild roses and blackberries.
There was some talk about deeds and property rights. Don Gravely kept trying to bully the county surveyor out there, but the surveyor told Don he wasn’t paid enough to set foot on Starling land and that Don no longer had enough money to bribe him, which was perfectly true. With the plant closed and the family accounts all tied up in court because that librarian just would not let the case go, Don was starting to fall behind on his accounts. The mailman reported the delivery of several bills with pink paper visible through the plastic window. People said it was only a matter of time before a Realtor hung their sign up on the front lawn of the big brand-new house.
But by early fall even regular people were starting to wonder about the Starling place. As the leaves shriveled you could make out little slices of the house through the bare branches, and what you saw didn’t look good. The walls were leaning funny, slanting inward, so that it looked like the only thing keeping Starling House upright was wisteria. The county administrator began to mutter about health hazards and seizure rights. The older folks in town told him to hold his horses, that a new Starling always turned up at these times.