“If I can’t really do anything with it, maybe I should just sell it,” Alex said, thinking out loud.
Ben pulled his soldering project closer. “That sounds wise. Sell it and buy yourself that car you want.”
Alex suspiciously eyed the back of his grandfather’s head. “I like the Cherokee. I only want a starter motor.”
“It’s your birthday, Alex. Now you can buy yourself a proper present. The kind none of us could ever afford for you.”
“I never really wanted for anything,” Alex said in quiet protest as he laid a hand gently on his grandfather’s shoulder. “I always had everything I needed, and what I really needed the most.”
“Kind of like my coffeepot,” his grandfather muttered. “Never wanted anything better.” He abruptly turned back, looking uncharacteristically stern. “Sell the land, Alex. It’s just trees and rocks—it’s good for nothing.”
Trees and rocks sounded good to Alex. He loved such places. That was his favorite thing to paint.
“Sell it, that’s my advice,” Ben pressed. “You’ve no need of Castle Mountain.”
“Castle what?”
“Castle Mountain. It’s a mountain that sits roughly in the center of the land.”
“Why’s it called Castle Mountain?”
Ben turned away and worked for a time bending the tubing on his essence extractor to some plan known only to him. “People say it looks like a castle. Never saw the resemblance, myself.”
Alex smiled. “I don’t think Indian Rock looks much like an Indian.”
“There you go. Same thing. People see what they want to see, I guess.” Ben didn’t look back as he handed the papers over his shoulder. “Get the deed transferred, then sell the place and be rid of it, that’s my advice, Alex.”
Alex slowly made his way to the stairs as he considered it all. He paused and looked back at his grandfather.
A dark look shadowed Ben’s face. “This is one of those things that I mentioned before, Alex, one of those things that doesn’t make proper sense.”
Alex wondered at seeing such a forbidding look for a second time that day. “Thanks, Ben, for your advice.”
His grandfather turned back to his soldering. “Don’t thank me unless you take the advice. Unless you heed it, it’s just words.”
Alex nodded absently. “I’m going to go see my mom.”
“Give her my best,” Ben murmured without turning.
His grandfather rarely went to visit his daughter-in-law. He hated the place where she was confined. Alex hated the place, too, but his mother was there and if he wanted to see her he had no choice.
Alex stared down at the envelope in his hand. It seemed that such an unexpected birthday present should make him happy, but it didn’t. It only reminded him of his dead father and his mother lost to another world.
Now this unknown connection to the past had found him.
Alex ran his fingers lightly over the age-dried label made out to his father. A faded pencil line ran through the name. Above, in the same nearly vanished, ghostlike pencil, was written his mother’s name. Her name was stricken through with a dark, angry line drawn in black ink.
Above that, in his grandfather’s handwriting, it said “Alexander Rahl.”
When Alex reached the landing on the stairs he thought that he saw someone out of the corner of his eye.
He turned only to see himself looking back from a mirror.
He stared for a moment; then his cell phone rang. When he answered it, he could hear only weird, garbled sounds, like disembodied whispers churning up from somewhere deep on the other side of the universe. He glanced at the display. It said OUT OF AREA. No doubt a wrong number. He flipped the cover closed and slipped the phone back in his pocket.
“Alexander,” Ben called.
Alex looked back, waiting.
“Trouble will find you.”
Alex smiled at his grandfather’s familiar mantra. It was meant as a world of love and concern wrapped in a call for vigilance. The familiar touchstone made him feel better, feel resolute.
“Thanks, Ben. I’ll talk to you later.”
Alex picked up the painting that he had brought from the gallery and headed up the stairs.
ALEX HAD BEEN FORTUNATE. His Jeep Cherokee had started on the first try.
After the long drive to the older part of downtown Orden, Nebraska, he parked near the end of a side street that sloped off downhill. That way, if his Jeep wouldn’t start, he could let it roll to get the engine to turn over.
In this older section of town there wasn’t much parking other than on the tree-lined streets. The needs of a hospital, parking being only one of them, had long ago rendered the facility obsolete and so it had been converted to a private asylum: Mother of Roses. The state paid for patients, like Alex’s mother, who were placed there by the order of the court.
In the beginning Ben had tried to get his daughter-in-law released into his and Alex’s grandmother’s custody. Alex had been too young to understand it all, but the end result had been that Ben had eventually given up. Years later, when Alex had pursued the same course, he had likewise gotten nowhere.
Dr. Hoffmann, the head of the psychiatric staff, had assured Alex that his mother was better off under professional care. Besides that, he said that they could not legally give him the responsibility of caring for a person who in their professional opinion could still become violent. His grandfather had put an arm around Alex’s shoulders and told him to come to terms with the fact that while there were those who went to Mother of Roses to get help, to get better, his mother would likely die there. It had felt to Alex like a death sentence.
The mature trees on the streets in that part of town and on the limited grounds of Mother of Roses asylum made the place look less harsh than it was. Alex knew that the somewhat distant hill where he’d parked made a convenient excuse to delay walking into the building where his mother was imprisoned. His insides always felt like they knotted up when he went into the place.
On the way over he had been so distracted by scattered thoughts competing for attention that he’d nearly run a red light. The thought of Officer Slawinski scowling at him had dissuaded him from trying to make it through the yellow. As it turned out, the light had switched to red before he’d even reached the crosswalk.
For some reason it felt like a day to be careful. Staring up at the glow of a red light that had come quicker than expected had felt like cosmic confirmation of his caution.
Walking beneath the enclosing shade of the mature oaks and maples, Alex headed around the side of the nine-story brick building. The front, on Thirteenth Street, had broad stone steps up to what he supposed was a beautiful entrance of cast concrete meant to look like a stone façade of vines growing over an ornate pointed arch framing deep-set oak doors. Going in the front was a lot more trouble because it required going through layers of bureaucracy needed for general visitors. Close family were allowed to go in through