From a Dark Place

By Louis Charbonneau

Some wounds never heal.

Jenny Vaughn loved Roy Landell since they were kids, so their engagement should have been a joyful celebration. But Jenny barely recognizes the man in front of her. It’s more than his appearance—ragged and gaunt—it’s the deep darkness behind his eyes, and his new obsession with his lost war dog.

Roy didn’t have an easy childhood, haunted by the rumors surrounding his mother’s suspicious death. So after his brutal tour in Vietnam, Roy’s return to Mt. Washington, Ohio is anything but happy. Except for his reunion with Bluka, the vicious German Shepherd who saved Roy’s life during battle. Fiercely loyal to Roy, Bluka is hostile toward anyone who comes near the battered Landell house, including Jenny.

Before long, the town is talking again. Neighborhood pets and innocent people are getting hurt—even killed—under mysterious circumstances. Is it coincidence, is the aggressive war dog to blame, or is some darker force from Roy’s past at work? To clear Roy’s name and save their future, Jenny must find out, even if it means using herself as bait.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781936535903

Louis Charbonneau

Louis Charbonneau, a native of Detroit, Michigan, served in the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II. While producing a variety of fiction over more than a quarter of a century, he has also been a teacher, copywriter, journalist, newspaper columnist and book editor. Under his own name and pseudonyms, he has written more than twenty novels in the fields of suspense, science fiction, and Western adventure.

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Charbonneau

PART 1

ONE

Roy’s back.

I know.

Tom Vaughn’s quick surprise shaded into disappointment. He looked away, his gray eyes as sullen as that August morning with its sultry sky. He stared out the kitchen window, peering past the yard and the chicken coop and the field of orderly sugar beets in the direction of town—and the Landell place. His eyes were not nearly as sharp as he pretended, and he refused to wear glasses for anything except reading, reluctant even then to see an optometrist. Instead he rummaged through the bin of reading glasses at Woolworth’s until he found a pair that suited him. She wondered if he could see the peaked roof and curving cupola of the Landell house a little more than a mile away.

If it had needed any confirmation, his curt remark made it clear that he had not softened his attitude toward Roy Landell. The war hadn’t changed that.

How do you know? Have you seen him?

No. I … heard from him.

Her father’s disappointment deepened into something else. It might have been chagrin over the failure of his little ploy, or resentment at the revelation that she had had a letter from Roy without mentioning it. But his reaction seemed stronger than either of these, and for a moment it puzzled her.

She wanted to tell him that he wasn’t being fair, to say aloud what she had never said, for this quarrel was an old one. It had lain silently between them for more than two years, hovering beneath the routine surface of their lives, like something motionless in a muddy pool that can be seen but not clearly. But she held her tongue. There was no need to tell him what he already knew.

He didn’t come back alone. He brought the dog with him. But I suppose you know that, Tom Vaughn added resentfully.

Oh, Daddy … She paused, fighting a not unfamiliar feeling of helplessness. You make it sound so …

"Well, isn’t it? Don’t you think it’s strange?"

No, I don’t.

Tom Vaughn’s grunt expressed disbelief. There’s already been some talk. Folks don’t like it.

What does it matter what people think? she retorted, her voice growing sharp. They were happy enough to see him go off to the other side of the world to fight and kill some other people he’d never seen and had nothing against. Let them talk.

Taken aback by her outburst, her father fell silent. Oh, my God, she thought, that’s the way we both are, trying not to hurt each other all the time, but born to such different worlds we can’t help it. Perhaps they would be better friends, after all, when she moved to a home and an independent life of her own, even though Tom Vaughn didn’t want to face that.

Jenny wondered, for the hundredth time, why her father disliked Roy Landell so much as a prospective son-in-law. It wasn’t just a widower’s reluctance to see his only daughter leave him for another, younger man, or the familiar paternal notion that no man could be good enough for her. His opposition was somehow more specific without ever having been articulated.

The Landells were an old Mt. Washington family, prosperous and solidly respectable even if different. Her father should have been delighted over the engagement. That’s how Jenny had thought of their understanding, informal though it was. During the interminable months Roy was in Vietnam, she felt engaged, betrothed, spoken for, all the ways of belonging she had ever dreamed of.

Roy had made it clear that he planned to settle permanently in Mt. Washington. So few young people wanted to stay in this quiet, rural town, that the prospect of having his daughter—and his grandchildren—close by should have been reason for Tom Vaughn to celebrate. Why did he continue to oppose what should have pleased him?

And why should he act afraid?

There had been times when Jenny wondered if her father harbored an old resentment against the Landells because they had been so successful, growing prosperous without visible effort while he had always had to struggle for a barely respectable living. But that was unjust. He never begrudged anyone what was earned by sweat or skill or even luck. Whatever was in her father’s mind lay deeper. Like the reason for his drinking.

Of course he despised what had happened to the land. Tom Vaughn thought that it was a sin to waste land, to let it lie barren and unfruitful like a neglected wife.

Or as useless as a widower in the night.

The Landell place was on the edge of town, the last house on the left going north along Rural Route No. 1. The Vaughn farm was a mile or so beyond it on the same road. From her upstairs bedroom, or from the tree she had climbed as a girl, Jenny had always been able to see the roof and the pointed spire of the graceful cupola with its weathervane in the distance that identified the Landell house. Every morning and afternoon, from autumn through spring, she had walked by it on the way to and from school. It was an old Victorian house of gables and peaks, porches and cupola, clapboard and shingles painted white, with elaborately turned spindles and columns, carved wood details like lace around the upstairs windows and crowning each of the porch columns. The windows themselves were handsomely leaded—one, overlooking the turn of the central staircase, was of beautiful stained glass. Some thought the place an architectural monstrosity. Jenny had always believed it to be the most beautiful house she had ever seen.

A faded beauty now, yesterday’s movie queen fallen on hard times, she thought, smiling at her own romantic imagery. The house was unromantically scarred, more than one window broken by the taunting stones of children who, during the long periods when the house stood empty and dark, came to believe that it was haunted. The white paint was gray and peeling and blistered. Shingles were missing from the roof, and there were gaps in the railing of one upstairs porch like missing teeth. One or more of the front porch steps were unsafe. Weeds grew up through cracks in the steps, as they did along the front path. What had once been a broad green lawn, sheltered by two huge old elm trees, was now knee deep in weeds and flowers grown wild, as carelessly beautiful as defiant children. The paved walk itself was cracked and uneven, whole slabs forced upward by the thrust of roots from one or the other of the elms.

In back of the house the fenced yard, where Ernest Landell had once fussed over his prizewinning roses and neat hedges, gave signs of being even more overgrown, a jungle. The arbor that spanned a path leading to a gazebo was so thickly woven that its vines shut out all light. The gazebo’s fluted columns were half-hidden by weeds and smothering vines.

There was also a garage where, as long as Jenny could remember, an old sleigh had stood, obscured by a mist of dust and cobwebs, its deeply curved runners rusted to red, the black leather of its seats cracked and hard, but somehow as appealing as a remembered winter of snow and sleigh bells. That antique sleigh had nearly been the occasion of the only quarrel Jenny and Roy Landell had had during the three months they were together before he was drafted. A collector from the city or, more likely, an antique dealer had come by and offered Roy fifteen dollars for the sleigh. He had sold it without hesitation. Afterward he had been irritated by Jenny’s shocked indignation, and she had swallowed some scornful words. After all, it was his sleigh to sell or keep. She simply couldn’t understand his indifference toward it. It was not only a family relic, but a charming memento of a time too quickly lost. The side of the garage where the sleigh had stood was now hidden behind its old-fashioned double doors. The pair of doors on the right side of the building had been forced open by youthful vandals, but they revealed nothing more mysterious than the oil stains left on the garage floor by a procession of Landell limousines. The garage, like the house, was sorely in need of paint, and the spine of its roof was bowed in like a caricature of a swaybacked horse.

Beyond the garage, the woods and the hills crowded close, overgrown like the rest of the Landell property, neglected, somehow forbidding, although on bright summer days children played in the shadows, and in the winter hunters wore paths among the trees and the thickly growing underbrush.

Jenny’s father had held the neglect of the land against all of the Landells, including Roy. It did no good to point out how little time Roy had had to make decisions after his father’s death. He could have had the land worked. He could have paid someone. I’d have done it myself if he’d asked, Tom Vaughn had said sourly when they had discussed it months ago.

Now, regarding her over the rim of his coffee mug—a favorite he would not give up although it was chipped and its cracks had long ago turned brown-Tom said, You’ll be dancing right over to him, I suppose.

Yes, Daddy. Of course I will.

What about that dog? She’s supposed to be dangerous.

Roy wouldn’t let anything happen to me.

I don’t like it. The army has good reasons for not letting them bring those killer dogs back. His is no different. They say they even carry diseases.

Bluka saved his life, Jenny said quietly, repeating Roy’s own explanation to her. He could never forget that.

In truth she found it easy to understand Roy’s feelings toward the dog. Loving Roy as she did, she felt something of his gratitude and affection for the animal.

It’s dangerous. I don’t want you getting hurt.

Oh, Daddy, stop worrying. I’m not going to get close to her if she’s that way. Besides, she repeated, Roy wouldn’t let anything happen. Not to me or anyone else, but especially not to me. She spoke with quiet conviction. There was much about Roy that she didn’t know, but she was sure that he loved her.

Oh, he had changed, as they all must have changed, the young soldiers trapped into fighting a terrible war. No one could go through what he had seen and suffered without being affected by it. She would have found indifference much more disturbing in him. The whole country had been wounded and changed, and would be a long time recovering.

But love didn’t change so easily.

She frowned, suddenly aware that she was evading the fact of having impulsively lied to her father about knowing in advance of Roy’s return. Why hadn’t Roy written or called? Why had he let her hear that he was back from someone else, just as her father had?

TWO

Although the actual periods they had spent together were few and brief, it seemed to Jenny Vaughn that she knew Roy Landell as well as she knew anyone in the world. She had first fallen childishly in love with him when she was ten years old and he was twelve, an eventful period in her life that was marred by sorrow as well as heightened by joyful discovery.

Jenny used to walk over to the Landell place almost every day that summer, in the afternoons after the dinner dishes had been washed and put away—one of her daily chores. Her mother, whose name was Elizabeth, had fallen ill that spring. For many weeks she had been bedridden, and strangely silent. Her father seemed to skirt wide around her, walking on eggs, his mood withdrawn and preoccupied and worried. Disturbed by the unhappy silence in the house, a joyless atmosphere she could not understand, Jenny was eager to get away after dinner. To let his heavy meal settle her father would nap for an hour, sitting alone on the front porch, the old swing rocking gently. Her mother would be sleeping in her room, shade and curtains drawn, the room as dim and hushed as twilight. At her first opportunity Jenny would sneak away, leaving Ida—a country woman from nearby, as plain and plump as bread dough—to finish the pans or to mop the kitchen floor or to start baking scones for supper. Ida had started to come in to cook and keep house for them when Jenny’s mother first became ill, and eight years later she was still doing the same.

Sometimes Jenny would sit on a little rise just north of the Landell house, watching Roy hit stones with a makeshift bat he had fashioned from a long, thin tree branch. He had a real baseball bat in the house, but he preferred the lighter stick for hitting stones.

Roy had worked out a kind of baseball game he could play by himself. First he would carefully select a pile of pebbles of the right size from the gravel road. In the game he would flip a stone up in the air and try to hit it before it came down with the stick, fungo-style, as he had once impatiently explained to her. A miss was a strike. A stone that fell out of reach when he tossed it up, causing him to hold back his swing, was called a ball. Where and how far he hit a stone determined hits and outs. In the ditch on either side of the road was an out. The road itself was a single. Over the first fence beyond the road was a two-base hit, and so on. Well beyond the fence a single huge oak stood sentinel like some ancient father of all scarecrows, left by a thoughtful or sentimental farmer long ago. Around it the furrows had been carefully plowed for generations. To hit it with a stone was a home run. Watching, Jenny was always as thrilled as Roy when a stone would cut a long high arc against the glittering sky and plummet at last into the waiting leaves of that far oak. She would echo his cry of triumph even though she didn’t comprehend his fascination with the game at all.

Boys also smoked cigarettes, and she was with Roy. one afternoon in the tool shed at the edge of the woods behind his house, with its smells of oil and grease and harness, when he smoked his first cigarette, trying not to cough. It was a Camel he had stolen from his father’s pack. I’d walk a mile for a Camel, he declared in a deep, grownup tone just before he lit the cigarette, causing her to shriek with laughter until her sides ached. Finally he had frowned her into silence. Do you want them to hear us? he warned.

She had been careful not to laugh when the inhaled smoke brought on a coughing fit. He had swallowed some of the smoke, he told her, gasping, hardly able to choke out the words.

Does it taste awful?

No, dummy! I always breathe like this.

One warm August afternoon he had permitted her to accompany him through the woods—or, more accurately, to trail behind him. They had wandered through a corn field first, high then, reaching well above their heads so that they could play all sorts of games of stalking and hiding, the adults always the enemy that threatened to find and torture them or somehow to spoil the fun. Roy’s parents were remote figures to Jenny, his mother a bright and slender woman who seemed to have an aureole of light around her like an angel, his father aloof and stern, a figure who commanded respect but who caused others to behave strangely around him, becoming something other than themselves. Even her own father was more dignified and stiff when he was with Mr. Landell.

No one followed them through the corn field or through the deep woods behind the house that led over a hill to a shallow creek where Roy sometimes caught catfish or small perch, while Jenny sat on the bank nearby and watched.

At twelve Roy Landell was an unusually handsome boy, tall for his age, yet slender like his mother. He had clear blue eyes and blond hair that was, at that time of the year, bleached almost white by the sun. His skin was very clear, unmarked by the freckles she despised on herself, and as yet not afflicted with adolescent blemishes. His features were like his mother’s, fine and neat, almost feminine—a straight thin nose, long dark eyelashes, high cheekbones and a full-lipped, sensitive mouth. He was intense in everything he did, a poor loser, and somewhat of a loner. He preferred his solitary games, it seemed, like the one with the stick and the stones, to wandering into town and finding some of the other boys with summertime on their hands. Jenny understood that, for she had few friends of her own. There were no girls her own age nearby, and two cousins from the next county, with whom she had hilarious times, came only rarely to visit. She was also shy with most strangers, and with boys in particular. She was shy with Roy, too, but in a different way. At least, he did not make her feel clumsy or silly or ill-at-ease. Most of the time he simply ignored her, but that in itself was a kind of tolerant acceptance. He allowed her to be there, to watch and to tag along behind him.

Jenny had no clear image of her physical self at that time, and the old Kodak snapshots in the drawer of the secretary didn’t help. She was a consciousness, an awareness, a self that remained vivid and seemingly unchanged. The photographs told her only that she had been a not-very-interesting small girl with brown hair that missed being strikingly dark or red or anything else noteworthy, a face with small and unremarkable features obscured by a spill of freckles across her nose and cheeks, and knees and elbows that always seemed to carry scars from tumbles and falls, for she had a tendency to run too fast. Nothing remarkable at all. Nothing to make a boy like Roy Landell look at her twice. And nothing to scare him off, either, she remembered gratefully.

On that hot August day Roy did not have his fishing pole. He sat beside the creek at a point where it widened out to a deeper pool often used for swimming. For a while he idly skipped flat stones over the surface of the water, or dropped others to watch the widening ripples. Then, because it was hot, he shucked off the T-shirt he wore and kicked off his shoes and lay on a big rock with his face turned up to the sun, his long lashes hiding his eyes so that she could not be sure if he could see or not, or even if he was awake or asleep. She watched him with a longing she did not understand, and with patient acceptance and joy.

Roy sat up suddenly, startling her. It’s too darned hot, he said. Let’s go for a swim.

I can’t. I don’t have a suit.

What does that matter? he asked scornfully, turning his long-lashed blue eyes upon her fully, causing her heart to skip. There’s no one else around to see us. There’s only us.

Without hesitation he peeled off his jeans, the summer