“You have to understand that we can’t help you.” The sheriff loomed over me, trying to intimidate. “And, more importantly, we don’t want to help you.”

“All I want to know is who killed my uncle,” I said evenly. I buried him that morning and they picked me up as I left the funeral, the only mourner.

“You uncle wasn’t killed, he just died,” he said.

“Ripped his own heart out and then dumped himself into the swamp?”

“The swamp is what done that, gators.”

“The autopsy says a knife.”

“Maybe a gator with a knife,” the deputy with him said. Funny guy.

“No more questions,” the sheriff said, pressing his index finger into my forehead hard. “This is where the bullet will go. Right in the middle here.” Officer Friendly smelled like cheap bourbon, cigars, and meat sweat. I snorted.

“Don’t be in this town after sun-up, Mr. Shaney,” the funny deputy said.

“His place is mine by birth,” I said.

“Fuck your birthright,” he said, real close to my face. His breath was an abattoir drain. “And just fuck you in general.”

He straightened up and flashed his jury grin. “You’re free to go.”

They pushed me out of the sheriff station and handed me a manila envelope with my personal effects: rental car keys, moneyclip–light by about a hundred dollars–and the big set of iron and brass keys to my uncle’s place. My uncle had been dead a week before the state finally notified me. The police weren’t investigating, and had joked to the local rag that it might have been a suicide. No one much liked my uncle but he was my uncle and the only family I had left.

I walked a couple of miles to the cemetery where I had been arrested and retrieved my rental car. I drove back to the family house, rotted in glories long past, a High Southern Gothic mansion with a sagging roof, half-surrounded by swamp. It had been in the family since the war. My uncle only lived in a small portion of the house and left the rest to the devil, the swamp creeping toward it, The swamp never sleeps, it teems with foul life and reaches out, vines and moss, frogs, newts, beetles, unspeakable things from the depths, blind, crawling.

The house was cool and empty. I found the room he kept clean for company, just for me, I guess, fell asleep cradling his shotgun.

---

I spent the next morning going through my uncle’s papers. Elaborate family trees going back centuries. Old photographs. A blueprint of the house with corrections in his shaky spider script. A dairy with pages of some sort of language I didn’t recognize, triangles and lines, then page-long bursts of liquid-linked letters. Even the parts in English were hard to read, pages were so filled with writing they were tangled, like Christmas lights of words. The last half of the diary was my uncle’s notes. Much of it referred back to the pages of foreign script, attempts to decipher it, puzzling over meaning.

At the end of the diary there were a couple of pages:

But what is it? It has been around for centuries, changing hands, all those people that have tried to figure out what it is. I could know more but what I already know says leave it where it is.

But what is it? It has been around for centuries, changing hands, all those people that have tried to figure out what it is. I could know more but what I already know says leave it where it is.

The second page was a single line:

I should get rid of it, maybe throw it in the swamp.

And then, in big angry scrubbed-on letters in dark pencil, taking up the entire page, screaming in all-caps:

THEY WILL TAKE IT

I had no idea what any of this meant. Even though I spent a few summers with him, mostly to “get me out of her hair” according to my mom, he never talked much about himself much, spending most of his time hunting or fishing, often spending days saying little more than a few grunts, others spilling out family history about people I had never known. The house was a bunch of locked doors and the junk of a once-rich family.

Around noon, a crunch of gravel. A cop car pulled across the end of the driveway for a few moments, and then drove away.

---

“I knew your uncle,” the old drunk said, weatherbeaten face wincing in a smile. “He was a friend of mine, you know.” I was sitting facing the door of the bar.

“What happened to him?” I asked, lowering my voice.

“That fucking house is what happened to him!” the old drunk said loudly.

“Earl,” the keep said, a warning.

Earl swayed back and forth, drank his beer, then looked at me with wino-eyes, but seemed also to sober up. “There is something in that house,” he said.

I gestured for the barkeep to bring Earl another beer but he just grimaced.

“In the house!” Earl said.

“Out, both of you, out!” the bartender ordered.

Earl drank off his beer, staggered a couple yards away from the bar and collapsed. I checked that he was breathing and slipped a $20 into his shirt pocket. I left while the keep was calling 911.

A sheriff’s prowler followed me to the house.

---

I looked at my uncle’s amended blueprints for the house again the next morning. They made no sense as I walked through the house with them. Frustrated, I went outside for air, skirting the swamp. Something huge made a splash in the water. A bird screamed.

That night I heard something sliding in the house, a shuffle of feet maybe. I sat up, the shotgun aimed at the door. I waited like that until dawn.

---

I went to the town’s public library with some of the family photographs and the diary. It was a small Carnegie Library, Classical Revival block of granite with columns and broad steps leading up from the sidewalk. It was humid inside and as soon as I stepped in the HVAC system kicked in with a loud bang that made me start.

“Can I help you?” the girl at the front desk asked brightly.

She was so beautiful, I took it like a punch to the gut. Lightly tan skin, eyes nearly black, black like her long hair. Tiny little thing, early-20s, just a few years younger than me, light silk shirt, peach. How did someone like this end up in a sleepy swamp town?

“Please, I have some questions,” I said.

“That’s what we are here for,” she said and smiled, flashing white teeth. I played it cool, trying to radiate indifference, usually worked for me with pretty girls.

“I have some old photographs from my family that I was wondering if someone could help me with,” I said, pulling a few out of a manila envelope.

“Oh, you want Martha,” she said, lightly picking out one of the photographs, using the edges. Long delicate fingers, nail polish a deep red-purple, echoing her light trace of lipstick.

“Let’s go see what kind of mood she is in,” she said. She turned to a chubby blonde and asked her to watch the desk.

“Mood?” I asked as I followed her up a set of stairs worn saddle-shaped by over a century of shoes. I tried not to stare at her back and legs. She had great legs, what I could see of them under her conservative skirt.

“She can get a bit cranky,” she said looking back.

She led me through a maze of bookcarts, and called “Martha?” to no answer.

“She might be asleep,” she said, turning to me. I looked at her nametag for the first time.

“Kali?” I asked.

“A joke by my parents,” she said, shrugging.

“It’s a beautiful name,” I said, “and at least you aren’t blue.” That got me a warm smile, something beyond professional courtesy.

“Martha?” she asked again, and softly pushed open an office door.

“I’m in here,” said a quavering voice.

“There is a gentleman here with some questions for you,” Kali said. I rolled her name around in my mind, savoring it.

“The bathroom is on the first floor,” Martha said. “Behind the leftmost column by the reference desk.”

“Librarian joke,” Kali whispered. “It’s the question most asked.”

“I heard that,” came Martha’s voice, “don’t tell him our inside jokes, girl.”

Kali led me past a desk stacked high with books. Martha was behind them; the office was stifling, close and hot.

“I have some questions, ma’am, about some things I found in my uncle’s house,” I said, trying out my rusty Southern charm.

She looked up at me, appraising me coolly through spidery-framed glasses on a chain. She was a little gnome, sunken by old age. Floral shirt that looked like an ugly couch.

“I can spot a Shaney easily enough,” she said finally. “I knew your great-uncle.”

“He has photographs,” Kali said.

“Of course he does,” Martha said. “Clean off a couple of seats.”

Kali and I took stacks of paper off of some sturdy wooden chairs, and put them where we could on overloaded desks.

“Be careful with those,” Martha said querulously.

“We are, Martha,” Kali said as we settled into the chairs.

“Photographs,” Martha said, holding out hands twisted with arthritis.

I handed them to her, a selection from what I found, ones I guessed were the oldest. She said nothing as she looked through them, and then arranged them on her desk like she was setting up a game of Solitaire.

“These are the oldest ones,” she said, pointing at a stack of small cases held together with tiny brass clasps. “Then these,” she said, pointing to small black images on metal with spots of rust. “Then these, these, and these,” running her finger to small yellow photographs the size of a business card, then to larger cards, images the same antique yellow.

Kali leaned across me to get a look. She smelled like frangipani.

Martha flipped the images on cards over one-by-one, like a Tarot reading. “Nothing on the tintypes,” tapping on the metal ones, “but that is not unusual.”

“Hand me a microspatula, dear,” she said to Kali, pointing at a black plastic carousel full of pencils, pens, letter-openers, staple-removers, and other small tools. Kali chose a steel tool with a small flat head. Microspatula. I filed the word away.

Martha opened the three small cases and pried the contents out with the tool. “Sometimes,” she said, as she worked, “the photographer would write the name inside the case.” She tilted one of the small cases to show me the thin paper underneath the sandwich of metal and glass she had removed. All three were blank. “Well, of course not,” she muttered as she fit the images back into their cases.

When she was done, she looked over the others. “Here,” Martha said, pointing to one of the larger cards. Faint handwriting I could barely see: Peggy Shaney.

“Peggy,” Martha said. “She killed her husband, can’t remember his name, she ended up in the county asylum. Your great-uncle’s mother.”

Kali made sympathetic noises.

Martha flipped them back over and studied them. A large gray cat wandered into the office and jumped in Kali’s lap.

“Did you get any mousies today, Dido?” Kali asked, rubbing the cat behind the ears.

“I know this one,” Martha said, tapping at one of the small yellow ones, a man in uniform. “Kali, go and fetch me the book with all the county historical photos, whatever it’s called.”

Kali nodded, handed me the cat, and left the room. The cat looked up at me dubiously, jumped down, and wandered out of the room.

“Don’t get any ideas, Shaney,” Martha said. “She’s not interested.”

“The cat?” I asked, knowing what she really meant.

“I knew your uncle,” Martha said, “even ran around with him for a while in high school. Kali is a sweet girl, doesn’t need a Shaney in her life.”

“I stayed with my uncle a couple of summers,” I said, jumping away from the subject, “when I was young.”

“He went nuts rattling around in that house,” she said. “Came up with all sorts of crazy things about the history of it.”

“Earl said there is something in the house,” I said.

“Earl’s a drunk. But the house has some odd things about it, even seen some of them myself. Your uncle got obsessed. One of the reasons your mother moved away. And that damned swamp.”

“The police said he killed himself,” I said bitterly. “They grilled me after the funeral.”

She laughed at that, a wicked witch cackle. “I see you’ve talked to our charming sheriff. Did he threaten to kill you?”

“Yes.”

“He hated your uncle, acted like just about everything bad that happened around here on him and your family in general.”

“Why?”

Before she could reply, Kali came in with a large book. I stood and took it from her to let her sit back down. Her attractiveness hit me all over again.

“Yes, that’s the one,” Martha said, placing my photographs to one side to make room as I sat the book down.

“Shaney, Shaney, Shaney,” Martha muttered as she ran a finger down the index. “Here it is,” she said. Kali and I both moved closer to look, our knees brushing one another. I felt like a dopey teenager as Martha flipped to a page that had reproduced the same photo and turned it around to Kali and me.

“Lieutenant Arthur Shaney, C.S.A.,” Kali said.

“War hero around these parts,” Martha said. “Built that house. Some said it was with money he stole during the war, maybe something else.”

“You found any Yankee gold around the house?” Kali asked me, throwing a drawl into her voice.

“No, but maybe I need a second pair of eyes to help me look,” I said. Martha glowered at me, but I’ve been glowered at by the best in the business.

“There is also this,” I said, gathering the photographs back into my envelope and placing the diary in front of her.

“He was always scribbling away in that,” Martha said, softness in her raspy voice, “for years and years.”

“You really loved him,” Kali said, touching her wrinkled arm.

“Nonsense, girl,” Martha said. She opened the notebook and started turning the pages.

“I can make out some of the stuff in English, but it has a lot of writing in it I can’t read,” I said.

Kali pointed to a page and said, “That’s Sanskrit, and, a couple of pages back, cuneiform.”

I raised my eyebrows.

She caught the look and shrugged. “I’m a librarian,” she said, “we know things.”

“There are some parts that I think are in English but I can’t read them,” reaching past Martha to flip forward a few pages to one of the densely-written pages.

“Cross-writing,” Martha said, “old way to conserve paper, you write normal then turn the page ninety degrees and write across it again.”

I looked at it and still couldn’t make sense of it. When I grimaced and sat back, Martha chuffed, nearly a laugh. “The page is tipped-in,” she said, tracing a seam. “It was originally a letter.” She flipped past a few pages. “These are all letters.”

“Dearest Vera,” Martha read out-loud. “Vera was Arthur’s wife, that just came back to me,” she said, tapping his photograph. “Making out the rest will take a little while.” Martha turned the page ninety-degrees and frowned. “This is Latin,” she said, running her finger along the letters fit sideways between other letters, “and this is Classical Greek.”

I turned to Kali, and asked, laughing a bit, “I don’t suppose you read Greek or Latin?”

“I can look up anything,” she said.

“Wait,” Martha said. “That line there is definitely Greek, but I’m not sure that the other one is Latin.”

“I can handle Greek,” Kali said. “Easy enough to translate.”

There was a soft bong. The library was closing. I gathered all my stuff. I helped Kali up, her hand trailing along my hand.

Martha shot me one more glare as I thanked her and said goodbye.

---

Kali photocopied the first page of cross-writing. I waited, bouncing on my heels a bit.

“Here you go,” she said, handing back the diary. I slipped it into the manilla envelope with the pictures. She walked out with me.

“I’ll work on it in the morning,” Kali said.

“I can’t thank you enough.” I asked, and before I had too much time to think about it, “Would you like to go for coffee sometime?”

“Dating a patron isn’t recommended,” she said coyly.

“Break the rules for me,” I said, leaning in.

“Only for you,” she said, then laughed, clear and indulgent.

What was I doing? But she took my arm as she walked me to my rental car and the doubt melted away.

I drove back to my uncle’s house, stood in the driveway looking at it, my rotting legacy.

“Shaney,” a voice behind me said. When I turned, I realized it was the butt of a long gun in the split-second before it hit me in the face.

---

“Can you hear me?” a woman asked. Cool hands on my face, something cold trickling into my blood, an IV.

“Don’t move,” the woman said. “We are still checking you for a concussion. You were lucky, someone driving past saw you unconscious in the road.”

“I don’t feel lucky,” I mumbled. She laughed softly.

“Can you tell me your name?”

“Shaney.”

“We are sending you for X-rays. Can you open your eyes?”

The light hurt and there were halos everywhere, like a migraine.

“I’m going to check your pupillary light reflex. It will be very bright.”

She had a slight accent I couldn’t place. More light hit my poor pupils and I gasped.

“That’s good,” she said, pulling back. I could finally see her as my pupils contracted, older lady, part Indian and something else. Something clicked.

“Now squeeze my fingers,” she said.

“Kali,” I said. “Library.”

“You’ve met my daughter?” she asked, surprised.

---

After the X-ray, she told me nothing was broken, no bleeding, no concussion. The nurses wrapped my face up like a mummy, Kali’s mother gave me a prescription for some weak painkillers. She was what my uncle would have called a “handsome woman.” She must have been a beauty in her youth.

“You were assaulted, so we called the police,” she said gently as I was trying out sitting in a chair. “We haven’t heard back from them.”

“The police did this to me.”

She gasped in shock, like a kind person would, one that hadn’t dealt much with the police.

“Are you sure? That is just awful,” she said, lowering her voice.

“They’ve threatened me a few times,” I told her. “They want me to leave town. I’m looking into my uncle’s death.”

“Shaney,” she said, “that’s how I know your name. I’m sorry about what happened to him.”

“Thank you,” I said through a throbbing jaw. The hit had loosened a couple of teeth.

“I should admit you,” she said.

“Please, don’t, I just want to go back to my uncle’s house.”

“You are done here, then, but you will need to rest tomorrow and come back in if you are dizzy or have any cognitive difficulties. Do you have someone you can call to take you home?”

I shook my head. That really hurt. “No, I’ll just walk back to my uncle’s place,” I said.

“My shift is over,” she said, “I’ll drive you home.”

“You don’t have to do that, Doc,” I said.

She gave me a combined mom and doctor stare and I didn’t object again. I tried to smile and it felt crooked and wrong.

---

“Is this it?” I could hear she was appalled.

“My uncle didn’t really keep it up,” I said sheepishly.

She got mom-sceptical. “You mentioned you knew my daughter…”

“She helped me at the library,” I said. “She was very kind to me. Not much of that here.”

She patted my arm. “Sleep as much as you can tonight and tomorrow, leave the bandages on, be careful with the jaw when eating,” she said. She looked at the house again. “You have food, yes?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I’ll take it easy.”

I watched her drive away. As I walked to the house, I saw that all four tires of my rental car were flat.

---

It was two days before I got back to the library. The swelling had gone down but I still had a bandage over the cut on my cheek and a big bruise. I had left the wounded rental car where it was and hoofed it.

Kali wasn’t at the main desk, and I got a thorough once over from a tall spinster before someone was sent to fetch her. She had a pencil holding her hair in a bun, blouse and skirt combo, cordovan and black. She was horrified when she got a good look at me and motioned me over to an office, shut the door behind us.

“What happened?” she asked, aghast. She went to touch my face, winced, and pulled back.

“Just a reminder from the police to leave town.”

She was disturbed, like her mother, shocked to find that the world is actually a broken place. It was sweet, really.

“So you are who my mom was talking about,” she finally said. “She never said who it was, but she did mention the police had beat up a young man.”

“She could’ve just told you,” I said. We sat down together on a worn-out couch. The entire office seemed worn down, all the edges sanded off. It smelled like ancient cigarette smoke and bad coffee.

“Medical privacy,” Kali said primly.

“I really like your mother,” I said. “She was very kind to me.” Kali beamed.

“Oh!’ she said. “Wait right here.” She left and I sat back. Talking was hurting more than I imagined, and I felt I looked gruesome.

She came back in after a few moments, carrying a sheaf of papers. She looked at my face again, grimaced, then grinned. “I thought you stood me up when you didn’t come back,” she said playfully.

“We can still go for coffee if you don’t mind me dribbling a bit.” That got me a smile.

“Anyway,” she said, “I figured out the Greek letters from the diary.” She handed me a notepad:

μέλᾰνλίθος

“My, uh, Greek is a bit rusty.” She laughed, throaty and indulgent.

“Melas lithos,” she said. “Translates as ‘black stone.’”

She pulled out the photocopy of the diary page, filled with notes. She ran her finger over the line with the Greek. “This is Latin and Greek and something that seems like Archaic French. The best I can do is “‘Ego sum inventus est lapis niger. “I have found the black stone and I am free.” The second line is the Greek melas lithos. The third is French, but all garbled and faded, but I think I got it: Ma propre fortune a esté escript, which translates rough to: ‘Mine fortune hath been writ.’”

“You spent too much time on this,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Anything for a boy my mother likes,” she said, and then smiled to herself. “There haven’t been too many of those.”

She passed me another paper. “This is the cross-writing I could make out. There is part of a line that is obscured by water damage, see that blank spot there? But I think Arthur was writing in all those different languages because he was in a prison camp.”

“A Civil War prison camp?”

“It’s the War of Northern Aggression around these parts,” she drawled. She laughed and leaned into me. I have the worst timing with women. I meet this wonderful girl while in town looking into my uncle’s murder, all while the police are threatening to kill me.

“Martha helped me with the rest of the letter,” she said, handing me a piece of notebook paper, neat handwriting, delicate, like her hands.

“Dearest Vera, I am to be released from the camp where I have been imprisoned all these months. Being away from you and the children has been unbearable. I cannot wait until [illegible]. I will rush to you when I am away from this [illegible] disease and [illegible]. There are sick men everywhere but I remain healthy. My love, my Vera.”

“This is amazing,” I said softly.

“I bet I could do the entire diary,” she said. “Bring it to me.”

“I don’t think that is a good idea,” I said. “The police might come after me again. What if you were hurt?”

“I’m tougher than I look,” she said, karate-chopping the air. I had that almost-queasy feeling of falling in love. I swallowed hard.

“What is your name?” she asked. “I can’t call you ‘Shaney’ like everyone else.”

“Arthur,” I said. “My name is Arthur.”

“Arthur?” she asked, “Would you like to have lunch with me?”

“I have a cracked molar,” I said. She laughed, then looked concerned, and then laughed again.

---

She ate delicately, small bites. I watched her gently nudge the grapes from her chicken salad to the side. I had some soup and a pimento cheese sandwich. The molar made nary a peep.

“Give me the rest of the diary,” she said over coffee, black and bitter at the diner, smelled like ashes. It was terrible. “I can figure out the entire thing. Or most of it.” She smiled. It was dazzling.

“It’s too much,” I said. “I can’t ask you to do all that.”

“You’re not asking, I’m offering.” She reached over to touch my hand.

I blushed, I fucking blushed, heat creeping up my face. “I’ll bring it by tomorrow.”

“I could come by tomorrow after work,” she said. She bit her lip a little. Fireworks.

“I’m not doing much,” I said, trying to stay cool.

“Call me,” she said, scribbling down her number on a napkin.

I would have to look for the phone, I hadn’t found it yet in the house.

---

I spent the rest of the afternoon and the next day thinking about Kali. The name was so incongruous it was intensely charming. I had no business with her, I wasn’t going to stay here, just find out by my uncle, sell the land the house sat on and go home. Not that there was anything there for me, just a couple of sullen ex-girlfriends, brutal winters, a job I didn’t like very much, a modest inheritance from my mother being burned up by the cost of living in a dirty city filled with crime. Mine fortune hath been writ, the past whispered. Kali was going to drop by. I cleaned up the room I slept in and tried to do something with the kitchen.

The light coming into the house was going green from the sun sinking into the swamp when she knocked on the front door.

“I would call this a fixer-upper,” she said, reaching up to touch the sagging lintel.

“It’s falling down around me,” I said. “I’m going to sell it, if I can, and go back home, I guess.”

“Where’s home?” she asked, looking at a bookcase full of paperbacks puffy from humidity.

“Detroit,” I said.

“You don’t have to go back, do you?”

“I guess not.”

“Then sell this place and stay here,” she said, smiling that smile I had figured out years go. I followed her into the kitchen filled with swamp light. She reached out and touched my bruised face and then kissed me.

“I can’t stay here,” I said, pushing her way softly.

She kissed me again, slipping between my hands.

“Where?” she asked. I led her into my clean bedroom and shut the door against the mildew smell of the rest of the house. She pulled me onto the bed.

---

We lay tangled together after, all sticky, and I traced one of her dark nipples with a forefinger.

“I hate Detroit,” I said. “My mother moved us up there to get away from the swamp, from our family.”

“I’ve never lived anywhere else,” she said. “Mom moved here right after medical school to be with my father, who was a local. Even after my Dad died, she decided she wanted to stay. She said she’s never going back to Sri Lanka.” I pulled her closer.

“How old were you when your Dad died?” I asked her.

“Twelve.”

“Eight for me.”

“The Dead Dad’s Club,” she said. She brushed my hair away from where the rifle butt had split my brow open and kissed it carefully.

“And my Mom, she’s been gone for a couple years now. Killed herself,” I said. She tensed beside me. I braced for the sympathy that always comes.

“What a shitty thing to do to you,” she said.

“With my uncle dead, I’ve got no one left.”

“Not even a girlfriend?” Kali asked, more than just curiosity in her voice.

“Not since the last one dumped me for being a loser,” I said, trying to make it a joke.

“You’re not a loser,” she murmured. I almost believed her. She pulled me closer still, one small breast settling into my armpit.

---

She was awake before me, it was the middle of the day and I had finally gotten a good night’s sleep. I heard her in the kitchen, opening cabinets and cursing a bit. I pulled on some clean clothes and joined her. She was in the half-filthy kitchen wearing nothing but the shirt I had on the day before. I winced at her bare feet on the splintered boards.

“Where is the coffee?” she asked.

“I don’t think there is any,” I said.

“OK, let me get dressed,” she said. “I have to have coffee.” We walked back to the bedroom and I sat on the edge of it and watched her dress. I could watch her get dressed for the rest of my life.

---

I told her how my uncle died, the violence of it, the obvious murder, as she drove us into town.

“All I’ve ever heard is that he drowned in the swamp,” she said, shocked.

“And now the weird shit with the house…”

“The melas lithos,” she said, her voice quivering a bit as she went over pot-holes. “I love mysteries.”

A cop car pulled in behind us as we crossed into downtown proper and followed us all the way to a little cafe jammed in-between a tobacconist and a closed drug store.

“It’s not safe for you to be around me,” jerking my head at the cop car as it slowed down to watch us park.

She laughed and then stopped when I turned to her so she could see the bruise across my cheek.

Kali knew the owner, hugged her over the counter on tip-toes. A danish and a bucket of coffee later, I felt human again.

“I need a shower,” she said, picking at her clothes.

“I’d invite you to take one at my place, but it just spits mud. I’ve been washing in the sink.”

She wrinkled her nose. “You’ve been in a town, what, a week? And nothing but a whore’s bath?”

“There’s a pay shower over at the RV park,” I said.

“Nope,” she said, “nope, nope. We’re going over to my place.”

“You go on, I’ll see you later,” I said.

“No, no more RV showers for you.” She tugged me up out of my chair and gently pushed me toward her car.

---

“Arthur?” her mother asked as we entered the house. I made an awkward wave; Kali smiled and scuttled off to the shower.

“Hey, Doc,” I mumbled, embarrassed.

She came to me and looked my injuries over, tut-tut-tutting as she checked the Steri-Strips holding my brow together, and lightly touching my bruises.

“Use a heating pad on your face. It will break down the blood in the bruise to clear it faster. Have you had a dentist check your teeth?”

“No, ma’am, not yet,” I said, looking around the house with even more embarrassment. She caught the look on my face.

“My daughter is an adult that can make her own choices,” she said, herding me toward a couch. I decided saying nothing was for the best.

After I sat down, she said, “You will stay for dinner.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“And stop calling me ‘ma’am.’”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Smart-ass,” she said, grinning, and walked into the kitchen.

---

After the shower, I felt great, but I had to put the same clothes back on, which I’ve always hated. It was like wearing a dead man’s clothes.

As her mother worked in the kitchen, I asked Kali where there was a laundry in town. She rolled her eyes.

“Just bring them here and use our washing machine,” Kali said.

“That’s very generous, but…”

“No buts,” she said, “we’ll pick them up tomorrow.”

I felt useless. “Can I help with anything? In the kitchen, I mean?”

“Stay out of my mother’s kitchen; she doesn’t even let me in there.” She leaned over and kissed me. A cat jumped up the couch, stared me down a bit and ran off.

“Don’t take it personally, she hates everyone,” she said.

“None of the cats in this town seem to like me,” I said.

Laughing, she said, “Come on, help me set the table.”

Whatever was going in the kitchen smelled delicious. I had been living on fast food and convenience store crap for a couple weeks. I was faintly worried real food would kill me.

Her mother came in with a mound of food, manicotti in a red sauce on a giant platter.

“I haven’t had a man in the house to feed for a long time,” she said, shooting a glance at Kali.

“It seems like you should have been finding me dates in the ER,” Kali said, giving my hand a soft squeeze.

---

The carbs at dinner hit me like a shot of morphine. I felt pleasantly sleepy and heavy.

Kali had an early morning at the library. She had offered to let me stay at her house for the night, but the two smiling women and hateful cat was more than I could handle. It felt strange to have people be so nice to me. My anxiety that they could be hurt because of me, because of my uncle, because of this Southern Gothic bullshit, made me sick to my stomach, an acid edge of bile in the back of my throat.

She drove me to the and I went in to fetch the diary and blueprints. “I shouldn’t do this,” I said as I passed them to her through the car window.

“It’s just an old diary,” she said, taking it out of my hand.

I looked back at the house, sagging roof and rotting wood, the swamp beyond.

“I should just burn this place down,” I said.

“Dissolving styrofoam in gasoline makes pretty good homebrew napalm,” Kali said.

“What?”

“We know things, we librarians,” she said in a spooky voice.

“Do you know how to stay out of trouble?”

She laughed and drove away.

I stood looking at the house, the fucking house. It would be a pleasure to burn it. I walked out back and watched the swamp until it got dark. Something screamed out in the swamp as the sun finally sank. The humidity smothered me like a wet towel.

---

“Do you have an axe?” she asked before I could even say hello. She bustled past me excitedly. “We might need an axe.” She kissed me. She tasted like coffee and cloves.

“I guess? Somewhere.”

“C’mon,” she said.

I followed her into the kitchen and she spread out the blueprints.

“There seems to be at least one blocked off room on the second floor. Find the stairs to the attic. And we need to check out the basement.”

“Houses in the swamp don’t have basements.”

“There’s one on the blueprint,” she said.

She pointed out the anomalies on the blueprint and what she was able to decipher from my uncle’s handwriting. We walked around the outside of the house. There were more windows facing the swamp than bedrooms. I took a hatchet with us that my uncle kept on a hook by the backdoor.

Kali was all smiles as she tapped the walls along the second floor wallway. One piece of panelling made a hollow noise. She giggled with delight.

“Harriet The Spy was my favorite book as a girl,” she said. “And Nancy Drew, of course.” She pushed against the hollow panel and it didn’t budge; she pushed the knotholes and none of them opened the door.

“OK, we do it the hard way,” I said, motioning for her to get behind me. I tapped along the wall again to find the edge of the hollow space, planted the hatchet blade as deep as I could and pried. The panel popped loose and I was able to set it aside. The room behind the panel was dark, the ancient flashlight I found barely able to penetrate the gloom. I found the light switch, clicked it up and down a few times. Nothing.

“Found ‘em,” Kali said and opened the heavy drapes to reveal a filthy window, that sickly green swamp light flooding in.

The room was a nightmare. A jumble of broken furniture was piled in one corner and the walls had brown-black streaks that I was reasonably sure was dried blood, very old blood. The room smelled of rust, dust, copper and mildew. Whatever happened here must have happened a long time ago.

“Holy fuck,” Kali said. She crossed to the ancient desk in the middle of the room. Something had been butchered on it, the surface black. She opened one of the drawers.

“Bones,” she said, “hundreds of tiny bones”

I stooped to pick up a newspaper on the floor. “1922,” I said, holding it out to her.

She pulled the diary out of her bag and flipped through it. “There is a little family tree in the back,” she said, backing to the window for light. I walked around the desk, looking at it from all angles. A floor board creaked oddly.

“I922 is when Peggy’s husband died,” she said. “His name was Owen Shaney.”

“My uncle never talked about his parents at all,” I said, squatting to tap the creaking board.

“Your uncle was born seven months after the date on the newspaper,” she said. “She was already pregnant when she killed him.”

“Must have given birth in the asylum,” I said.

“Do you think she killed him in this room?” she asked.

“It certainly looks like it.”

“And they just closed it up like this?”

I got my fingernails under the board and pulled it out of the floor. There was a filthy bag under it.

“Treasure?” Kaii asked excitedly. “Is it treasure?” She moved to squat next to me.

I turned the bag out onto the floor. There was an old-style liquor bottle, fat and stout and empty, a number of coins, all ones I didn’t recognize, old, and the bones of a mouse.

Kali took the coins and examined them. There was a square one, and one with a hole in the center, and a giant copper coin that looked like a penny. Kali picked through them, showed me one, and said, “OK, this one is going to be worth some money.” She pointed at the portrait stamped into the tarnished silver. “I think this is Roman, a sestertius.”

“I wonder what something like that is worth?”

“It’s in pretty good condition,” she said, trying to hand me the coins.

“You hold on to them.”

“Really?” she asked.

“I trust you not to steal them,” I said, grinning. As she tucked them into her bag, I probed the hole in the floor with the flashlight. Nothing else but cobwebs.

We searched the room, found a ledger from a cash store I didn’t recognize the name of, pages of ancient paper with faded writing, the lower drawer of the desk was full of rotted lace, maybe a table-runner. I even peeled back a section of mold-spotted wallpaper to only find bulging plaster walls, and knocked along them to see if there were more hidden doors.

---

We went looking for more rooms in the house. One door wouldn’t open with any of the keys I had found, so I knocked the doorknob off with the hatchet, brittle metal shattering. The room was empty but for an empty chiffarobe in the far corner. I examined it carefully.

“Where are the passages between rooms; the vaults of untold riches?” Kali asked in mock outrage. I kissed her then, in that empty room, and showed her the surprise. I pushed against the back of the chiffarobe and with a loud click, the back swung open to a bedroom beyond. She squealed with glee.

It was pretty disappointing. There was just an old bed with no mattress, exposed rusted springs, a dresser full of bed linens, not much else. We knew the room existed from the blueprints, but using the hidden passage made her so giddy.

Kali pulled out the blueprint and spread it out on the bed. “I think this is the right room,” she said. “Your uncle made so many corrections and drew over so many places.” She pointed at the closet.

I had to pull a few nails out before I could get the door open, crude stairs leading up.

“Let me go first, just in case,” I said, flashlight in my left hand, the hatchet in the right.

The attic was dark and stuffy and dusty, humped forms of canvas-covered furniture menacing.

“Any creepy albino kids?” Kali asked, halfway up the stairs.

“No, no albino kids.”

“Don’t eat any powdered doughnuts,” Kali said, mock solemn.

In the vast attic there was the junk of generations: broken chairs, bed frames, a bizarre number of birdcages, trunks to open, dresser drawers to search. It took us the rest of the day, Kali leaving to get us some lunch and buy more batteries for the flashlights. The trunks proved full of old moth-eaten clothes, mice nests, wallets, watches, books damaged by mold, more old photographs.

“All of it has been up here for decades,” I said. “None of this has to do with my uncle’s death.”

---

Kali took me to her house when it got dark, to shower and get something for dinner.

“My mother has a night shift,” she said, shedding pieces of clothing on her way to the shower, looking back over her shoulder until I followed.

We washed each other, the slippery soap on her body wonderous. I was so erect that it hurt. I dried off quickly after and let her lead me to her bedroom. I was stupid in love with her already.

---

She drove me to the house in the morning. My poor rental car had been set on fire, and the burnt skeleton of metal and melted plastic looked forlorn.

“Maybe you should stay with me,” she said.

“Just go on to work,” I said.

“I get off at two, no mysteries without me.”

“I promise,” I said. I gave her a kiss before getting out.

---

They were waiting for me inside and I took another beating–a light one this time, all things considered. Three masked men screamed, “Where is it?!?” over and over again as they hit me. No head shots, just punches and kicks to the stomach, driving air out of my lungs. I vomited after one hit and they danced away.

“You find it, Shaney,” one said, leaning over me. I knew that voice. The sheriff. “You find it and you give it to me, or we give you to the swamp and find it ourselves.” He slapped my face, right on the healing bruise.

---

“You’re going home and we are going to stop seeing each other,” I said as she examined the bruises over my kidneys and ribs. I had lain in the hallway for about an hour before I dragged myself to bed and took the last five of the weak painkillers from the hospital. I was warm and blissed out when she found me.

“What did they want?” she asked as she cradled my head.

“Melas lithos,” I said, surely butchering the pronunciation, “The Black Stone. There’s nothing much else in the house worth anything.”

“Our options: We find it and hide it,” she said. “We find it and leave town. Or we find it and give it to them.”

“It’s my family legacy,” I said. “Mine fortune hath been writ.”

“Is this what fortune looks like?” she asked, a bitter laugh coming as she gently outlined a bruise over my ribs.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Let’s just leave. I don’t care about the stone. We leave and never come back.”

“But the mystery…” she said, “it’s so… mysterious. About the only place left is the basement. We’ll check it in the morning.”

It was my turn to laugh, but it came out worried. I kissed her neck, I kissed her cheek, I kissed those purple-red lips.

“Be careful, I don’t want to hurt you,” she whispered as she pulled her clothes off.

“How could you ever hurt me?”

---

She wouldn’t take “no” for an answer, and took me home with her. I put the shotgun in the trunk of her car, just in case.

“This is simply unacceptable!” her mother said angrily as she poked and prodded my various injuries. I had promised her I would go with her to the ER if she decided I needed to.

“One rib might be bruised,” she said. “Breathe in as deeply as you can.”

Right at the end, I winced. She nodded. “That’s not too bad. I don’t think they broke anything.”

“It was a very considerate beating,” I said, but neither of them laughed.

Doc turned to Kali and said, “Fetch me one of the long bandages in the utility room.”

After she left, I lowered my voice and said, “Doc, you have to make her stop seeing me.”

“She makes her own choices,” she said.

“She sees my car burned, she sees my beaten body,” I said. “She seems to think all of this is a game.”

“Then you need to tell her yourself,” she said.

“I have,” I said. “I’m in love with her. I love her so much. I’m going to leave town, I’m not even going to sell the house, just leave it to rot. You have to make sure she doesn’t get near that place again.”

Doc was quiet while she wound the bandage around my chest to help support the rib. For every wince, Kali matched it.

“You will stay the night here,” Kali’s mother said. She went into the kitchen and I heard cabinets and pans.

After dinner, I insisted on sleeping on the couch. They both clucked but left me to it.

When I was sure they were both asleep, I left as quietly as I could, wrote a cowardly note to Kali, telling her to stay away from me and the house, that I could never forgive myself if she got hurt. I walked back on deserted streets, taking the shotgun out of the car with me.

---

The wall that was marked on the blueprints as the basement was behind the refrigerator, a smooth wall of plaster. Houses in the swamp don’t have basements. Kali had to be correct that this must be where the stone was hidden. I was going to find the damn thing and give it to the sheriff. I didn’t care, I just wanted this over with. Maybe I could stay here, maybe I could be with Kali once those lunatics were sated.

I fetched a pickaxe from the shed out back and attacked the wall. Everything hurt when the pickaxe bit in: my head, my ribs, my hands, arms, even my feet. A chunk of plaster dropped away to reveal cinderblock. I swung the pickaxe again and again until the wall began to crumble.

On the other side was a short set of crude stairs that led down to a tunnel that was so dark it seemed to push light away. I took the shotgun down with me, flashlight jammed in my armpit, hatchet in my belt loop. The air smelled of mold and rot and every surface seeped some foul liquid. It wasn’t far, maybe fifteen feet, before I saw the altar of roots and the small banded box entwined there.

I pulled the box free but the roots didn’t want to let go, some had grown through the hinges. I hacked at the roots with the hatchet until I freed the box, pried it open. The stone was wholly unremarkable, black with a white band running through it, about the size of a lime. I picked it up before I could think it was a bad idea. The stone was warm and heavy; felt like it was made to fit my hand. It also felt wrong, like it was squirming. I stood in that dank, horrible tunnel, excited and repulsed.

The scream made me rush back out.

---

They didn’t even bother wearing masks this time. The sheriff had Kali’s hair twisted in his hand, practically lifting her off the ground, goon deputy laughing.

“Where is it, Shaney?” the sheriff asked.

“I have it,” I said, holding out the banded box, “just let her go.”

“I’m sorry,” Kali said. “I just came over to help.” Seeing her apologize for these assholes brought a cold fury upon me.

“Your uncle should have listened to us,” the sheriff said, shaking Kali like a rat terrier. “Wouldn’t have been pushed to extremes like this.”

“My uncle never told me about it,” I said, still holding the box out.

“Bullshit,” the deputy said.

“Just take it and let her go,” I said.

“Nah, you put us through too much trouble to just walk away,” the sheriff said, tossing Kali down at my feet. “We’ll give you both to the swamp.”

“Just take it!” I said and threw the box to the floor.

When they both bent to reach for it, I took the shotgun from behind the ragged hole that led to the basement. I cut the deputy in half. Kali screamed over the deafening blast. The sheriff grabbed the box off the floor and dived out of the kitchen.

I picked Kali up off the floor and pushed her toward the back door. “Go!” I yelled over the ringing in my ears.

I was watching her run when the sheriff shot me twice. The first went through my left arm–no bone, just meat–and the second carved a groove along my hip. He rolled away when I fired back. Over the ringing in my ears, I heard the back screen door close with a rattling bam. As I fumbled two more shells into the shotgun, I heard the front door slam as well. The sheriff. I followed him in case he meant to go after Kali, but he was leaning against his car, fumbling with the box. I shot him low, tops of his thighs chopped up. He fell against his car and then to the ground, dropping his pistol and the box.

I dropped the shotgun, clamped a hand over my upper arm, limped toward him and kicked his gun away.

“You dumb fuck.” I picked up the box and opened it for him. “It’s just a fucking rock,” I said. I took it out and smashed it into his face over and over until he was torn and bloody.

I took his revolver, checked ammo, and left him there. I didn’t know if he was alive or not, didn’t care.

My body was giving out as I heard her scream again, vision tunneling, color draining out of everything. Three men had ambushed me at the house yesterday. I rounded the house as fast as I could.

Some raw-boned redneck was the backyard, shivering, pale. “Where is she?” I yelled at him, gun up.

One shaking hand pointed at the swamp. “It took her, the swamp took her!” he mumbled.

“What does that mean?” I asked him.

“The swamp!” he said again. I shot him through the mouth.

“KALI!” I called her name over and over, moving from mound to mound in the swamp until there was nothing beyond but water and alligators.

“Is this it?” I said to the rock in my hand. “Is it?” I drew back to throw it into the swamp and the world went cold and black.

---

Cold and white and bright. I traded cold and black for cold and white. Someone loomed between me and the light. I tried to shield my eyes with my good right arm and couldn’t. I was handcuffed to the bed. I uncurled my fist and the black stone fell onto the bed beside me.

“Where is she? Is she OK?” I asked thickly, tongue scaly in my mouth. I asked over and over again until I fell back into morphine.

---

It was night before her mother came to see me.

“Where is she?” I asked her. “No one will tell me.”

“You killed two deputies and put the sheriff into a coma,” she said.

“They were hurting Kali,” I said. “They hurt her.”

“They found her in the swamp,” she said, picking up the stone laying on the bed beside me. “You were holding this so tightly when you came in that we were afraid we would break your fingers to get it out.” She placed it gently on my chest.

“I tried to give it to them, I never wanted it,” I said.

“My daughter is dead,” she said, and walked out of the room.

---

I focused on the stone after she left, that hateful thing on my chest, willing it to break or disappear or just fuck off back to wherever it came from.

Ma propre fortune a esté escript.

The state trooper guarding my door leaned in to stare at me. He ushered someone in. The guy was tall and thin in his cheap suit. “I’m your court-appointed lawyer,” he said gravely.

The words were garbled, what past Arthur wrote. It wasn’t “fortune.”

My fate has been sealed.