Welcome to the Family
By Sharon Hunt
It was just past midnight on the darkest night I could remember. The moon had slunk behind storm clouds that would soon split open and drown all the other pitiful creatures up here on the mountain with me. The wind had been picking up speed for the last hour and was now galloping along, the handful of lights downtown just flicking off, along with the scattered streetlights that still worked on Main Street. This storm was going to be a bruiser, and here I was headed into the woods.
There was no cure for stupid, as my wife took every opportunity to remind me.
Or loyalty, I sometimes shot back, to be met by her infuriated glare.
In a few hours, the woman I once believed I could not live without would be coming back, more broken than ever, after twenty-one years in that place.
Twenty-one years ago, Mandy was just nineteen and me twenty, and while she had a name, money and beauty, I had nothing of much worth but my pride, which I let her take away from me. I wasn’t about to get that back anymore, but it doesn’t matter now because I’ve lived longer without than with it and besides, what did pride really mean to “the Townsend Boys,” as many in town had been referring to my father and me for decades? Pride in being bad seeds? Pride in screwing up women’s lives?
Well, it wasn’t as simple as that.
By the time I got to the north wall of Mandy’s family compound, I was out of breath and shivering. I was going to dig up what I buried on the other side of that wall after the murder, figuring, rightly, that the police would never dare search the compound, so that was the safest place for it.
That wall had once been nothing to me, a leap and a latch onto the eight-foot-high ledge, then a thrust of my legs over. I always nailed the landing, as I imagined the sportscaster Jim McKay saying, while I bowed to my audience of one waiting at the back door of the main house.
I was a pretty good athlete in high school, good enough to be offered a few track scholarships to universities well away from here. I should have taken one but got waylaid by love and then loyalty. The decades since had destroyed my back and knees; the dampness made the pain and stiffness worse. I was an old man tonight, struggling up and over the crumbling concrete and when I lost my grip and fell, it wasn’t cartoon funny like when all those pretty cats fall from great heights and land on all fours, spouting indignant “meows” and flicking their tails as they walk away. No, it was Wile E. Coyote sad, and I crawled to the nearby tree, dazed.
McKay was classy enough not to comment on my ancient youth; his being long gone as well, he probably understood the despair I felt.
The main house was also like me, rundown from years of neglect. The three story crimson brick and copper roof once towered over the town, gleaming like a beacon to us mere mortals below. The guest house beside it looked worse and had been empty for years. When Old Joseph Breckenridge—Joseph the Terrible, some of us nicknamed him—was alive, the guest house was always filled with fancy people ferried up the mountain in black Mercedes-Benz, their doors opened by uniformed staff with permanent smiles. There was dancing under canopies of lights that rivaled God’s own stars, champagne imbibed by the caseload and deals inked as fast as the lackey lawyers could draw up the contracts, meaning more forced overtime for the poor sods who had to fill the orders in those contracts.
But after the murder, no one wanted to visit the compound anymore.
Even in its heyday, it never had much of a security system beyond the staff, who were mostly gone now, leaving the lone remaining Breckenridge to wander from floor to floor like an angry ghost. Joseph the Terrible refused to believe that anyone would dare try to steal from or menace him and his, so in his mind, the copper gates and concrete walls were enough to ensure privacy and safety. He never thought the threat that brought everything crashing down would come from within. A bit of a Caesar, in that respect.
Yesterday, I confirmed the continued lack of security while buying drinks for Leo Norman, now crippled and perpetually drunk, but once head of security for Breckenridge Industries.
“There’s a camera at the front gates that some company monitors, but that’s it,” Leo said, raising his rum and coke before wincing in pain.
“Sacrificed my shoulder defending the old man when the union stuff happened. I should have let your father and the others have at him.”
Leo’s voice was laced with the same bitterness I heard for years, in my father’s.
“He was a scrapper, Hugh Thompson.”
“I’m sorry about the shoulder.”
“No, can’t blame him, fighting for his life and almost losing it, like the others did. The old man was a vicious bastard, but nobody knew that better than Hugh and you, Alexander.”
I put another ten on the counter, patted Leo’s other shoulder, and left.
Now it was me who winced as the trowel hit metal and the vibration moved up my arm like an electric shock. Pushing the rest of the dirt away, I pulled out the rusted box. After jimmying the lock open and checking that the knife was inside, I stuffed the box into a satchel, filled the hole back in and stood up, slowly.
Oh no, I think he’s in trouble, I imagined McKay saying about my wobbly stance.
McKay, as always, would be right.
I would soon be joining Leo on a bar stool—if I didn’t finally end up jail—moaning about a past that the Breckenridges had a big hand in screwing up, with Townsend acquiescence.
With the first flash of lightning, I thought I saw someone watching me from an upstairs window but put it down to nerves and exhaustion and slipped back over the wall. When I turned to look at the house again, I saw a raised hand as another flash better illuminated the figure.
Damn, now I would have two Breckenridge women to deal with. Bad luck kept galloping after me.
The deluge began on my way back through the woods, and by the time I got to the road where I left the bike, the rain was sluicing over me.
The road now resembled the surface of a sodden moon, with craters that could swallow you whole, although it was once kept in pristine condition. After the mill and factory closed though, there was no money or interest left in maintaining a private road to a kingdom no one cared about or was afraid of anymore.
After all, we fought a war to rid ourselves of monarchs.
Back home, I sat on the porch thinking about reburying the knife, but then figured, why?
The police gave up looking for it almost from the beginning, after that quick confession coupled with Joseph the Terrible’s instructions to close the case because his crazy granddaughter Mandy had killed her mother. There was nothing left to do but put her in an institution, a rich person institution of course, but an institution just the same. The judge quickly agreed—as he would, being that he was on the old man’s payroll—along with the police chief and various other public officials.
I would have left the knife where it was if I weren’t afraid that she would dig it up herself. She had been talking a lot about the truth finally coming out during our last few visits, about people getting themselves right and reclaiming their lost pride.
By “people” she meant her and me, but I suspected mostly her.
Well, the truth was best left dead and buried, I told her. And as for pride, it wasn’t worth a thin dime now, in our blighted lives. Survival and a little bit of peace were all that mattered; she owed me that.
She didn’t reply, which worried me. After all, what happened was her fault in the first place. I came in at the tail end and tried to do cleanup. In truth, I never understood why she killed her mother in the first place.
I took the knife out of the box and let the rain run over it for a while before wiping it dry and putting it in my coat pocket; I’d always carried the knife in one pocket or another until the murder.
In the house, I stuffed the empty box under a floorboard near the living room window, peeled off my soaking clothing, and stretched out on the sofa for a few hours before Mandy’s return.
The black Mercedes-Benz carrying her rolled out of the fog onto Main Street just before St. Stephens’ noon bell, driving at a pace reserved for a funeral cortege.
Well, this was a funeral of sorts, her coming back to a dead town and a near dead family.
The Mercedes was the last of her family’s once-gleaming fleet. At the height of the boom times, there were half a dozen such cars, all pampered like babies, in the compound. This one though had been neglected, the paint fading to dull grey on the roof and rust eating its way around the doorframes. Still, the car commanded curiosity because people knew who it belonged to. No one else in town had a Mercedes. Even when they could afford new vehicles, they bought Fords or Chryslers.
People watched it pass, unaware of who sat behind the darkened windows. Most didn’t suspect it was Mandy Breckenridge because no one thought she would ever be let go.
She was crazy.
Evil.
A butcher with a knife, just like one of Manson’s gang in California. She even had the long, shiny hair and perfect smile of a Charlie girl.
The cops knew she was coming home but said nothing. Neither did her great aunt Lucinda, who rarely left the compound anymore, waiting to be driven down to the family mausoleum, where her name was chiseled into the white Italian marble, close to Mandy’s. If the rumors were true, Lucinda would be taking her drive soon, the decades of illness, mostly mental, having finally whittled her down to something no longer formidable but forsaken, a Miss Haversham without the wedding dress.
She and Mandy were the only two Breckenridge women to never marry, and while Mandy made her peace with that years ago, Lucinda never did. She blamed her brother Joseph and Mandy’s mother Miranda, for blighting her life. If those two hadn’t been tearing each other apart, she might have been able to slip quietly away with the man she loved and some of the money she deserved, but their fighting turned Joseph into more of a monster than he already was. Miranda wanted her son Gregory to take over the business after her husband Robert died, but Joseph wasn’t interested in relinquishing power to anyone, especially not an “imbecile grandson whose mother would continue to pull his strings and be the power behind the throne.”
He took control of all the money and locked the compound down like a prison and Lucinda’s intended decided she wasn’t worth the effort, after all.
I didn’t give much credence to Lucinda being on her last legs because the rumors about her were usually naïve or just plain wrong. After all, it was she who finished off Breckenridge Industries more than the rest combined. If Robert Breckenridge hadn’t been coerced into getting on that boat by Lucinda, everyone suspected, he might have been able to talk some sense into his father and turn things around. Robert was the only sensible one in the family. But Lucinda wasn’t interested in sense by that time, just revenge.
Gregory though, blamed Mandy for hammering the final nail into Breckenridge Industries. By the time the last global economic meltdown and Lucinda were done, there wasn’t even a hammer, let alone nails. Still, the gruesome “Blood-Soaked Little Rich Girl Cuts Mommy Down to Size” and “Lumber Heiress Carves up Her Mother” headlines didn’t help.
When the newspapers got going, even Joseph the Terrible couldn’t control things. He died unexpectedly, not long after Mandy was committed. A few years later, the businesses were dead and gone too, along with a lot of the family wealth. Gregory couldn’t attract a wife after that. He somehow ended up face down in the pool in the basement, although he was afraid of water after what happened to his father.
Soon the Breckenridge strain would die out, what with Gregory being the last male in the family, Mandy being well past child-bearing age; Lucinda had passed that mark decades ago.
The thought of that whole family disappearing off the face of the earth wasn’t an unwelcomed one, not even to me. I felt the same way about the Townsend lot, although my son Jed would probably do his best to keep things going for a generation more, wherever he was; somewhere on the west coast was as close as his mother and I could get to pinpointing his whereabouts.
Mandy’s whereabouts however were right in front of me, in the back seat of that Mercedes. Of course, I knew she was coming home because she told me last Saturday, the two-hundred and fifty-second time I took my wife Donna’s car and drove thirty miles to the East Haven Hospital.
In all those years, I had been Mandy’s only visitor, figuring I owed her for keeping quiet and not naming me as an accomplice to murder. Truth be told, I also wanted to pretend that we still had this great passion and would somehow find a kind of happily ever after, but Mandy quickly dissuaded me of that fantasy, refusing to kiss or even hug me when we met. It was as if we were brother and sister; physical contact was forbidden by her in such a relationship, as it had been with Gregory.
Still, I kept visiting.
Neither Gregory nor Lucinda ever did. To them, Mandy was as dead as her mother.
Dead, until this resurrection, which wouldn’t be eternal.
As the Mercedes neared, I was overcome with an urge to wave like a child watching someone important pass, but I tamped that down when Donna came out of the bank.
“Jesus, she’s back,” she said, taking one look at my face before walking away.
During the boom times, if this car had been part of a funeral cortege, people would have lined the street, bowing their heads as it passed. Businesses would be shuttered and light poles draped in black silk as a sign of respect. Now, what businesses remained survived by hardly ever shutting their doors, and the light poles were shrouded in graffiti instead of silk.
When the graffiti first appeared, it was quickly removed, but after the money dried up, it was added to by any bastard with a spray can and an attitude. That included Jed, now likely doing worse than spraying swear words on metal poles, having inherited the Townsend Boys’ bad gene.
It was a good thing for Jed and the others that Joseph the Terrible was dead when the graffiti appeared. If he had been alive, he would have dealt with it in his never subtle way, having the bastards found and assured that their actions would not be tolerated, while hands were broken and heads cracked.
Like he had assured bastards from another generation that their actions would not be tolerated when they tried to get a union into his businesses, although their injuries were much more serious.
Over the years, I’ve mostly blocked out the news photographs of my father being pulled from the wreckage of that boat, and now I did the same as the Mercedes stopped at the end of the street as if resting up before beginning its climb.
Soon, it crawled skyward.
When it finally parked in front of the main house, Mandy would step out into this drizzled May afternoon, shivering as the cold hit her skeletal frame.
Lucinda would probably not be at the door to greet her, since she only took her back because she didn’t want her living in town and humiliating the family name more. At least in the compound she would be out of sight, the way most Breckenridge women had been, since the town began.
Like many small towns, Breckenridge was built on a central industry, in this case lumber. It was founded by Mandy’s great-great grandfather Cyrus, who rode into what was then a hardwood forest and declared he would make his fortune there. He took half a day’s ride from the ship that transported him across the ocean from England, where he had been a thief and likely a murderer.
In Breckenridge, he became a king of industry but remained a thief, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake.
He quickly bought up thousands of acres of forest and started a lumber business that soon supplied most of the east coast. With money to burn, he brought over craftsmen from England who were aided by cheap local labor to build what became the family compound. A decade after the main house was finished, he died there, in his English oak bed. Although there were rumors of foul play, his wife had him quickly buried and his son stepped into his place. Later, Cyrus’ son and every subsequent male Breckenridge died in that house, often amid rumors of unnatural causes that the women shut down fast.
Breckenridge women rarely died in their beds. Instead, they expired in locked bathrooms, the woods, or occasionally, in hotel rooms in distant cities where rumor had it, they fled, trying to escape fathers, husbands, brothers, or sons.
Miranda died in Mandy’s bedroom at the first summer party since the union drive was put down, in a pool of blood that quickly began smelling rotten in the July heat.
Unionizing was my father’s idea. The drive was intentionally violent from the start, propelled by his hatred of Joseph the Terrible and his son Robert, Miranda’s husband. It ended with my father and two other leaders on Robert’s boat that exploded on Breckenridge Lake, killing the other leaders and leaving my father wishing it had killed him. Robert, too, was killed, having been convinced it would be seen as a gesture of goodwill that he and the union leaders were there, negotiating. Whether or not Lucinda knew that Joseph had a bomb planted on the boat, I don’t know, but my bet is she did; killing Joseph’s only son as retribution for how Joseph destroyed her life. . . well she would simply be following in a long line of Breckenridge women who helped their male relatives along into the next world.
The explosion was quickly declared an accident, but everyone knew it was Joseph the Terrible’s way of concluding union talks.
It was also a way for him to put an end to my father’s continued pursuit of his son’s wife, which had begun when Miranda first arrived in town, as Robert intended.
“Keep away from those women,” my father warned me after it was clear I was falling for Mandy, but I didn’t listen any more than he had after Miranda looked his way.
The Breckenridge family usually added brides to the compound, since offspring tended to be males, lone males. If husbands were needed, they came from rich, out-of-town families, not local riffraff like the Townsend Boys.
I had been going out with Donna for two years when Mandy beckoned me. After that, for a few short months, there was nothing else I wanted in life but her.
I was handsome then, although it was marred by a crescent-shaped scar under my right eye from where my father had thrown a knife at me, enraged by my defiance and his own deformity. The explosion had cost him his left arm, half his face had been burned, and he had a limp that forced him to use a cane for the rest of his life.
My mother kept loving him despite his deformities, but he never believed her, saying she stayed around out of pity. She left when I was fourteen, no longer able to abide his rages. I guess she didn’t take me with her because someone had to look after the man who would never let her forget she wasn’t Miranda Breckenridge. Neither of us saw her again, although there were rumors that she had come back for a few days before Miranda died. In this town, though, rumors are like ghosts—best ignored, as you whistled past them.
For a while after my mother left, it was a little easier in the house without the daily fights. My father let me help him sometimes, when he wasn’t drinking. He talked to me about going away to university somewhere, anywhere but here—but that didn’t happen, and he died as broken-hearted about me as he was by his own sorry life.
Some families are destined for tragedy, I guess. The Thompsons and the Breckenridges were alike in that way, at least.
We were also alike in our stubborn refusal to back down until everything around us was in ruins.
I didn’t think that would happen to Mandy and me, though. We were planning to run away, leave the day of the party when the compound would be filled with people coming and going, and it would be easier to slip out, unnoticed.
The afternoon before, we met at the lake where her father and mine had ended up in that boat. It was chilly, and she was decked out in a thin, summer dress that I quickly covered with my jacket. I showed her the bus tickets I’d bought to get us to the next town and the train that would take us to Boston, where we were going to find a little apartment, get jobs, and live like normal people.
“It still seems like a dream, that we will get away,” she said, before we went our separate ways.
“Well, dreams do come true, you know,” I said.
She kissed me, but there was a look in her eyes, not quite fear but definitely wariness.
Still, I watched until she had disappeared down the path towards town, smiling and thinking that in less than twenty-four hours, we would leave this town behind and . . . well . . . anyway.
The next morning, I dressed in my best Sunday clothes, then realizing she still had my jacket, pulled a sweater over my shirt and headed out to the party.
The annual party had been a tradition for decades, with Joseph the Terrible opening the compound to the town on the first Saturday of each July.
That last one was held on a day when the sky was bluer than anyone could remember, and the breeze was warm and gentle.
Everyone was dressed up, and children laughed as they followed their parents onto the buses that ferried them up the mountain.
The first level of the main house was open for people to wander through and see all the English oak, aged to a glorious, dark sheen on the walls, the marble tabletops, and the crystal chandelier made of a thousand pieces that took up most of the ceiling. Mandy told me that as a child, Joseph the Terrible had once swung on it after jumping off the second-floor banister to avoid a beating from his father.
There were flowers everywhere, mostly roses, and their perfume became sickly after a while, the air so thick with it that it was sometimes hard to breathe, or so it felt to me that day.
Outside, the emerald grass looked as if it had been trimmed with scissors. There was a gazebo on either side of the front garden, gilded and glowing, and around back, a wide patio under a blood-red tarp held up by poles wrapped in lights. All the trees were oak, brought over from an ancient forest across the ocean. Near the back wall was a merry-go-round that Joseph the Terrible’s father Edgar commissioned for his seventh birthday, before Joseph became headstrong and swung away from the beating he would eventually receive.
The merry-go-round horses circled endlessly, as did the cotton candy machine, to the delight of the children. There was a soda fountain and ice cream stand, and tables were covered with sandwiches and cakes. Bartenders dispensed every kind of drink.
As they entered the compound, the children were given gifts.
My mother brought me to one of the parties when I was a boy. I remembered watching Mandy in a pale pink dress, riding the merry-go-round by herself while we boys were given oak-handled hunting knives.
I always carried that knife in a coat pocket, thinking it was a good luck charm, although it brought no luck that day.
When I arrived at the party, Miranda was already swaying on her feet, having started drinking early as she always did, Mandy said. As Miranda started dancing around some of the men from town, Joseph took her by the arm and hauled her off into the house. Gregory was smoking in a corner ignoring everyone, while Lucinda was sitting at her bedroom window, watching everyone like a sentinel.
I went looking for Mandy. Although it wasn’t yet noon, there were already swarms of people around; a good time to slip away.
I found her in the sitting room outside her bedroom. She was crying. There was blood on her green dress, on her face and hands.
Without a word, she led me into the bedroom, where Miranda was face down on the rug in front of the bed. The knife, my knife, was lying next to her. In a corner near the door was the bag Mandy had packed to go away with me.
Everything happened so quickly after that. I sat her in a chair then checked Miranda for a pulse, although from the amount of blood on the carpet, I knew she was dead. I picked up the knife, wiped it off with Miranda’s scarf, and slid it into my pants pocket.
“What happened?”
Mandy shook her head.
“Go, Alex, just go.”
“No, I won’t leave you.”
But she convinced me that it would be better for me and for her if I did, so I snuck down the back stairs—like I had many times since we met—and out a side door close to the wall that I scaled faster than I ever remembered. Once over it, I sat down and started to cry, but got moving again quickly through the woods, then ran along the road until I reached a path that led to town.
I was almost home when I heard the police sirens.
There were more sirens this morning as I started riding up the mountain, and there was a smell of smoke. I figured someone had set another fire in the park just beyond the church. That had been happening for weeks.
Finally at the gate, I left the bike leaning against the wall, wiped the sweat off my face, and walked into the compound. Someone—probably Mandy, who had called me last night asking to meet this morning—left the gate open.
Lucinda opened the door when I knocked. She was wearing a yellow satin blouse that shimmered when the sun hit it and a large topaz ring that looked like it could put out an eye. The look she gave me could definitely kill, but she stepped aside and let me pass without saying a word. She motioned me to the kitchen but went into the living room herself.
The kitchen countertops were littered with dirty dishes because the housekeeper hadn’t arrived yet, Mandy said.
She looked ghostly, as if the house was syphoning the blood from her body; at least in the institution, she looked healthy, physically that is.
I knew she would call me up to the house eventually but hadn’t expected her to so soon. She had only been back two days.
When I walked over to give her a hug, she pulled back, shaking her head.
“I have to tell you something, then you need to go. Lucinda doesn’t want you here.”
“Does Lucinda know what you have to tell me?”
“No, although I think she suspects, has maybe always suspected.”
After she told me, it felt like the wind had been knocked out of me.
I sat for a while on a chair before finally saying, “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“You were back with Donna, and I didn’t want to hurt you any more than I had.”
“But you want to hurt me now.”
Mandy backed up as my voice rose, and I felt bad that I scared her.
“You needed to know the truth finally, so we can both have some peace.”
I laughed.
“Yes, knowing this will give me a lot of peace.”
I left not long after that. At the gate, my legs felt rubbery and I latched onto it, willing myself not to fall—to maintain a little dignity, given that she and Lucinda were probably watching me.
He’s making a brave effort.
Thanks, Jim, for lying, I thought, as I disappeared behind the wall, bending over and breathing deeply.
Christ, Almighty.
On the way back down the hill, I walked the bike at first, thinking that if my legs were going to give out, it would be better to fall on my knees than fall off the bike, especially since the hairpin turn that had claimed a number of lives over the years was coming up. I could just imagine missing that turn, flying out into the air and plummeting into the trees below. How long would I be rotting there before anyone started looking for me? Donna certainly wouldn’t start very quickly, now that Mandy was back and Mandy, well, I didn’t imagine she would either, after this morning.
She had made it clear that what she said didn’t change the most important fact: we were still as finished as we had been the day that she killed her mother and kept me out of it because, although she knew she would end up in a posh institution, I would fester and waste away in some prison cell as her accomplice for walking the murder weapon out of the house, and she couldn’t allow that to happen.
“I kept you out of it because I loved you,” she said again, adding that, “finding out you are my half-brother didn’t change that, then.”
“Of course, it changed that, after.”
She didn’t answer.
Half-brother . . . I wondered if my father ever knew Mandy was his daughter. I doubted it because he would never have let our relationship start if he had. And Miranda, well after her husband died, she was so focused on making Gregory the new king of Breckenridge Industries that she didn’t notice what her daughter was up to.
“Not that she ever took much notice of me anyway, until she caught me packing and I told her I was leaving with you. She actually laughed, after telling me the truth,” Mandy said.
“I hated her so much, at that moment.”
The sky was becoming overcast again, with dark clouds gathering. Dampness had already seeped into me. I started to shiver.
Lifting a leg over the crossbar, I began pedaling. Soon, the bike was picking up speed. As I tried to avoid a crater, the bike lurched forward and started skidding toward the edge of the hairpin turn.
Welcome to the family, Mandy, I thought, closing my eyes.
