Hancock House

By Nellis Boyer

When he looses his job, his marriage disintegrates, and his father has a debilitating stroke, Andy throws up his hands and moves back to California and the house where he grew up, hoping to help the old man mend and heal himself. Melvin, Andy's father has a remarkable recovery, due largely to Andy's good work, and Andy discovers there really is no place like home. Memories of his happy childhood surround him , and when he discovers the Hancock House mansion across the street is about to be torn down, he tells his dad about Louie, the skeleton in the attic, and Melvin makes him tell the police. From there on, murderous behaviors come to light, Andy is reunited with his childhood sweetheart, Annie, now a forensic pathologist with the county, and a strange lady in black arrives in town, stalking Hancock House, seeking the bodies of her dead children.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 4, 2009
• ISBN: 9781440134760

Nellis Boyer

Nellis Boyer lives on seventeen acres in northern California with her husband, Jerry, and a household of rescued animals. This is her eighth book.

Book preview

Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER

TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER

TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER

TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER

TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER

TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER

TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER

TWENTY EIGHT

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

California, 1966

The best dirt-clod fights happen in spring, after a light rain, when the ground is wet but not soggy and the grass is tall and green. A handful of stems makes a nice wad of dirt at the roots, and they pull up easily and hang together in a big, tight ball. A good release is important, and if you swing the clod around your head, faster each time, and let go at just the right moment, the missile sails off like a comet, trailing its tail behind until it smashes into your target. We team up for dirt-clod fights, but nobody really wins. And we don’t stop until we’re so caked with mud we can hardly move, then we clomp to the stream- filled ditches along El Camino Real and let the water wash us clean while we hunt frogs. When we get bored with that, we explore the secret jungle across the street from my house, behind the high iron fence where we’re never supposed to go, but often do.

This afternoon, two of us are called home, but we three who remain at large wiggle under the forbidden iron fence, our thin, young bodies fitting neatly in the space we’ve made by scraping away the dirt with rocks. Behind the overgrowth of vines, trees, and thick, prickly shrubs is a mansion that takes up the whole block. The old Hancock House, Dad calls it, and it’s locked up tight, but we know how to get inside. Around the back, below ground level, is a basement with a broken window, and we slide through the narrow opening and land on the cement floor amid a pile of old canvas tarps and drop cloths they used to cover the furniture upstairs. The first time we came here, we were spooked out of our wits, but now it’s routine, an adventure for a lazy afternoon, a secret hideout from parents and shopping trips. We have flashlights and soda pop and a box of crackers in a brown paper sack that we stashed on a shelf. The basement is like our own private fort, and from here, we set out, and every time we explore Hancock House, we discover new things. It’s as if the owners went out one day and never came back. Dirty laundry sits in the washing machine, the refrigerator door stands open, a supply of rotted food clings to its shelves, clothes hang in the closets, and the calendar on the kitchen wall is turned to October 1958.

The mansion is three stories plus an attic; the attic windows are the only eyes that remain free of the crawling, green foliage that slowly swallowed the rest of the house. Today, as we prowl the third floor hallway, we discover an old wooden trunk with a rounded top, and when we open it, taking all three of us to lift the lid, we’re disappointed to find only papers instead of pirates’ gold or treasure, but then, why would one leave treasure behind? We creep on, up a flight of narrow, creaking stars to the attic, a hot dusty space that smells like stale bread and dried newspaper. Beams of light filter through the windows in the roof, and the dust particles disturbed by our footsteps dance in their shafts.

We don’t need our flashlights up here, so we click them off and stick them in our back pockets. Breathing the stale, hot air is uncomfortable, and I have to take deep breaths to fill my lungs. I feel dizzy, like I’m going to pass out. I look at Annie to see if she notices, because I love her, and I don’t want her to think I’m a sissy. Annie is smart and pretty and nice—probably too nice to call me a sissy anyway, no matter what—and even though she’s a year older than me, I think she likes me. Her hair is the color of the poppies that grow wild along the creek beds, and it curls around her face and makes her eyes look as blue as the sky. She smiles a lot, and sometimes she holds my hand when we hunt for frogs. I don’t think she knows I love her. Nobody else knows either. It’s my secret. Finally, the dizzy feeling goes away, and I can breathe again. We push past sealed boxes and old chairs and tables covered with the canvas cloth, and then Harry bumps into a birdcage, tipping it onto a carton of old milk bottles. The noise scares us at first, but we know it’s just us. And then we see that it isn’t just us, for sitting in a rocking chair, looking out a window, is a human skeleton. We think it’s real, but we’re not afraid, because it’s dead. We agree that whoever it is must have been there a long time, for all that’s left are bones and a lump of gray hair that sits like a Brillo pad on top of the head.

Harry steps forward and touches the arm bone.

It’s a real one, Andy, he says to me.

I touch the jaw. It has all its teeth, and it looks like it’s smiling, but all skeletons look like that.

It’s real all right, but why do you think it’s up here? I ask, and no one has an answer.

Annie, the smartest among us, says it might be a teaching skeleton like doctors use to learn about the human body. That sounds good, and we think she’s probably right, but it looks like it would fall apart if we tried to move it, so we don’t.

Of all the things in the old Hancock House that we have discovered up to now, this skeleton is the most exciting, and we decide not to tell anyone about it except our friends who had to go home early today, and definitely not our parents. So we sit around looking at it for a while, and then we slip out of the house the way we came in, wiggle under the fence, and go home.

After dinner, Harry and I meet at the big tree in the middle of our block and climb up into its branches. High up where the limbs fork, leaving a flat space, we’ve made a fort, and we sit there discussing the skeleton and what to do about it. We name him Louie, though we have no reason to think it’s a man, but we have to call it something, and a woman would most likely have been sitting in the kitchen, we figure, not in the attic.

Halloween is almost here, and Harry thinks it would be fun to dress Louie up and sit him on a porch somewhere, but there are problems with that: number one, he’ll fall apart; number two, we’ll have to explain where we got him; and number three, we’ll get in trouble for sneaking into the Hancock House in the first place. I say we should leave Louie in that chair, and that’s what we do, visiting him less and less, for we have school and sports, and he’s just an old, dead skeleton. The best we can do for Louie is keep his secret and bring him kids to scare once in awhile, and that’s fun, but they have to swear never to tell about him, and no one ever does.

So Hancock House sits decaying behind the iron fence, Louie its only inhabitant, and as the years pass, we go there less and less, for we are outgrowing its eerie fascination. As far as we know, nobody ever visits, and the thick, tall vines that cling to its walls grow heavier and more dense, covering the shuttered windows and tugging at the board and batten, trying to pull it down, and no gardeners come to trim the undergrowth that swallows the walkways, obscuring the structure from the road. My father, Melvin, who works for the local land title company, checks the tax rolls periodically, for doesn’t he have a vested interest in knowing what’s going on across the street? Someone is paying taxes on the place, he says, and it’s still deeded to Lester Hancock. Dad has wholeheartedly approved of the abandonment from the get-go, for it means no more noisy parties to wake him in the middle of the night. So the status quo is established, and I seldom pay attention to the vast greenery across the way as I am preparing to graduate from high school and embark upon a college career at Northwestern University in Illinois, my first time away from home and California, and as it happens, I settle there in the snow country after graduation, and it isn’t until 1998 that everything changes.

CHAPTER ONE

1998

In January, my wife of three years, Lois, left with her boss for a week-long seminar in the Virgin Islands and came home waving divorce papers in my face. I graciously moved into a rental house, allowing her the freedom she so desired, and a month later, I got laid off from my job in the laboratory at Mercy Hospital due to cutbacks, they said. Depressed and desperate for income with which to support myself and the lifestyle of the estranged—for she demanded a monthly stipend, which her attorney encouraged me to cough up—I answered an ad in the newspaper and was hired to sell used cars on a commission basis in a lot downtown. I was managing to keep roofs over our separate heads when Oakmills Hospital in California called in June with news that my father, Melvin, had suffered a stroke, paralyzing the right side of his body and affecting his speech. Feeling duty bound and powerless over life’s surprises, I quit my car salesman’s job, leaving Lois’s upkeep in her lover’s hands, and went home to take care of Dad. That’s when I renewed my acquaintance with Hancock House.

Mom had died of leukemia when I was three, so it had been just the two of us as far back as I could remember, and now Dad was less than half of what he used to be. Having no mental image of Elaine, my mother, I had made one up. She had been beautiful and kind and smart and benevolent, but she wasn’t here to take care of her husband, my father, so I allowed myself a reward, a bonus of sorts for being a good son. It was the dream of finding Annie again—Annie, whom I had secretly loved all my adolescent years-Annie, who had grown into a beautiful young lady in high school. She was popular and vivacious, and I was shy and reclusive, never able to summon the nerve to approach her after hitting puberty. So when we graduated and I was given an offer I couldn’t refuse, a partial scholarship to Northwestern, I went away to snow country, her picture in my wallet. Then somehow, after managing to graduate, get a good job, and stay single for twenty years, I’d married Lois, a woman I’d known for two months. Now that marriage had disintegrated after three vacuous years, and I didn’t really care. Actually, if I were to be honest with myself, I was glad for its demise. Lois was shallow and selfish, and if I hadn’t been so lonely and depressed, not to mention cold all the time, I probably wouldn’t have married anyone.

Dad hadn’t wanted me to be bothered with coming home, saying he’d sell the house and go into a nursing home. But that was a terrible solution to our mutual problems, and because I needed a place now anyway, moving back to California sounded wonderful, for I was not, and had never really been, a snow person.

So I returned to the state of my birth, and although the circumstances that brought me were less than cheerful, I felt as if I’d come full circle and was back, through no fault of my own, where I belonged. I stood at my father’s front door on a lovely July morning, with a suitcase in each hand and Dad’s old steamer trunk on the way. No sooner had I carried the bags up to my old room than Chlorice, Dad’s home health care professional, summoned me to the living room, where she proceeded to lay forth instructions on the proper care and feeding of Melvin. She bent his legs at the knees and stretched them out and bent them again and flexed his feet and wiggled each of his toes, reciting This Little Piggy. She showed me how to change the bag that collected his urine and how to help him to the toilet for his bowel movements.

Working the muscles so they didn’t become atrophied was important, she’d said, and hopefully Dad’s brain would remember how to make them work at his commands again. We practiced speech patterns and words from simple story books, which I read and he tried to repeat, sounding out syllables like we did in grade school. After several days of training, Chlorice said I had things down to her liking, and she officially turned Dad’s care over to me. I accepted the responsibility for his recovery with confidence, an abiding certainty assuring me that he would be whole again, and soon. Where this notion came from, I do not know, but it was strong enough to drive away any doubt I might have felt.

We worked diligently, pushing the physical therapy a bit more each day. After two weeks had passed, we were finishing a morning session, and he grabbed my arm, smiled at me, and said, Aarrndy, drawing out the A and adding Rs, but he grinned and knew he’d done good. Before the day was out, he said, Andy, plain enough. I was proud of him, like a father whose kid had said his first word, and I knew how Dad must have felt now that our roles were reversed.

Dad hadn’t touched my room in all the years I’d been away—it was still the same old kid’s room I’d grown up in—and although I liked to think he had done this in a fit of nostalgia, I now realized he was just lazy. It had been easier to simply close the door when I left. He wasn’t a decorator. Now it sure felt good to sit on my old bed, knowing nothing had changed on purpose: my model airplanes still hung on wires from the ceiling, the maps from National Geographic papered the walls, and the souvenirs I’d lifted from Hancock House still sat on my battered, nicked, built-in desk under the window that looked out into our backyard. The questionable piece of bleached bone sat in my pencil holder along with a long, thick, ivory-handled letter opener. Both items had lain on the bottom of the big, round-topped, paper-filled trunk. I’d taken a deep breath and dived in, swimming through the litter, my feet kicking in the air, and as my hands fluttered along the bottom, I’d grasped the objects, pushed off, and burst to the surface—in my kid’s imagination, a diver bringing up pearls. I’d thought about putting them back, but I didn’t, because they were small, insignificant things, and I’d brought them up from the depths, risking my short life. Plus, I’d wanted souvenirs.

Memories of that day came rushing back, and I felt my face flush at the thought of my lost love, Annie. What excitement those young years had held. What huge disappointment fate had dealt years later. If we could turn back the clock would things be any different? There was always the hope that Annie and I would meet again. I curtailed the daydreaming and pondered my two Hancock House trophies. Heaven knows I could have purloined many more items, but it didn’t seem right, and even back then, I realized I was stealing—from whom, I wasn’t sure. Maybe just from the mansion, which had always seemed an entity unto itself.

Dad’s house was a two-story lathe and plaster French colonial style place built in the thirties, and the three bedrooms were all upstairs, so the home health service made him comfortable in the living room in a special hospital bed, for he couldn’t negotiate stairs. They’d supplied him with a wheelchair, a potty chair, crutches, and a walker, and with all his attendant paraphernalia, the living room, with its fireplace and mirror over the mantel, looked like a villa-turned-hospital ward in a World War II movie. The dining room, kitchen, and downstairs bathroom all connected to this room via hallways, so once he was rolling, he was good to go wherever he wished on the first floor. The bedrooms remained unattainable, unless I carried him upstairs, and that was not possible, for he was too heavy for me to safely lift, and having not lost his sense of humor along with everything else, he said, E don neee ooo cipplles uner dis ruf.

When it was mealtime, I cheerfully cooked for the two of us in the kitchen that had been painted blue and pink for as long as I could remember, and we still ate off the chipped, square, black and white plates and drank out of the once brightly colored aluminum glasses that never wore out but became dented and scratched like thrift store specials. When I was little, the purple one had been my favorite, and now it was a washed-out blue. They never broke was the thing, and my father liked that.

The grout between the pink tiles on the countertops was beginning to chip and flake out of its groves, and I added it to my things-to-do list, for the old house was in need of many repairs. Dad, being stubborn, cheap, and unhandy, was not obliged to call repairmen unless a dire emergency had developed. Flaking grout, old windows that wouldn’t stay open, and dripping faucets were not emergencies, just minor annoyances.

Despite his refusal to keep up appearances, he enjoyed teasing Realtors, periodically inviting them out to give an estimate of value of his prime-location property, though he had no intention of selling. Gradually, the seasoned professionals grew wise to his game, figuring Melvin was just a lonely old man seeking company, and they made excuses not to go out when he called, but there were always the newbies coming on board, eager for a listing, and the pros urged them on, laughing as the office door banged behind them. One such novice who didn’t know better paid Dad a visit, and when he saw the butcher knife plunged point-first into the wood window sill upstairs, propping the window open a foot, he told Dad he needed to take care of his deferred maintenance, and Dad loved the words, telling everyone he had deferred maintenance, as though it was some exotic animal.

My mother probably wouldn’t have approved of the way he’d let the house run down, and although he didn’t talk about her much, I remembered one day in particular when he had. He missed female company, but he wouldn’t go on dates. When I asked him why, he jerked his thumb toward the ceiling and said, The best woman in the world is waiting for me upstairs, and since I knew Mom wasn’t in the house, I took it to mean she was waiting in Heaven, and I thought that was nice, to have someone waiting for you there. I was ten, and it sounded really good.

But with the stroke, he worried how he would tend the one thing he did revere: his garden. Plants seemed to know how much he cared, and in reciprocation, they grew for him. He whistled, sang, and talked to them, coaxing them into their finest blooms, and as he saw it, letting them down now that he was incapacitated would be tantamount to mass murder. I urged