Burning House by Ann Beattie Page B

dead.
    Ena was at the house because she thought that assembling there was a tribute to Wesley—no matter that in the six months he’d lived there he never invited the family to his house, and that the things they saw there now made Wesley more of an enigma And they had already begun to take his things. They obviously felt guilty or embarrassed about it, because when the three of them came in the night before, people began to confess: Elizabeth had taken Wesley’s Rapidograph, for Jason; for herself she had taken a dome-shaped paperweight, a souvenir of Texas with a longhorn cow facing down a cowboy with a lasso underwater, in a tableau that would fill with snow when the dome was shaken; Uncle Cal had taken a picture of Ena as a schoolgirl, in a heart-shaped frame. Ena had taken a keyring with three keys on it from Wesley’s night table. She did not know what locks the keys fit, because she had tried them on everything in the housewith no luck, but they were small antique keys and she wanted to get a chain for them and wear them as a necklace. Wesley was dead, drowned in Lake Champlain, two life vests floating near where the boat capsized, no explanation.
    Benton came out of the house. It was a cold morning, and it was early; Nick did not feel too cold because he had found a jacket on a hook by the back door—Wesley’s, no doubt—and put it on. Benton, in the black velvet jacket, hugged his arms in front of him.
    “I just realized that I dragged you here from California,” Benton said. “What are you doing out here?”
    “I couldn’t sleep. I came out to look around.”
    “What did you find?”
    “Pumpkins still growing in his garden.”
    At the back of the lawn, past a tangle of leafless berry bushes, was a fallen-down chicken coop. The roof barely cleared their heads. There was a cement floor, and most of the walls were still standing, but they were caving in, or missing boards.
    “Long time since this was in operation,” Benton said.
    “Imagine Wesley out in the country,” Nick said.
    Most of the back wall was missing from the coop. When they came to the end, Nick jumped down, about five feet, to the ground, and Benton jumped behind him. The woods were covered with damp leaves, thickly layered.
    “Although the shape that coop was in, I guess he was hardly the gentleman farmer,” Benton said. “What do you think about the way Ena’s acting?”
    “Ena’s edgy.”
    “She is,” Benton said. He pushed a branch out of his face; it was so brittle that it snapped. He used the piece of broken branch to poke at other branches. “I went into Jason’s bedroom and thought about kidnapping him. I didn’t even have the heart to wake him up to say hello.”
    “What time was it when you came out?”
    “Seven. Seven-thirty.”
    They saw a white house to their left, just outside the woods, and turned back for Wesley’s house. Wind chimes were clinking from a tree beside the chicken coop—long green tubes hitting together.
    Nick hadn’t seen the chimes when he walked back to the chicken coop earlier. They reminded him of the strange graveyard he and Wesley and Benton had gone through when they were in college and Wesley was a senior in high school, on a trip they took to see a friend who had moved to Charlemont, Massachusetts. It was Christmastime, after a snow, and Benton and Nick had been wearing high rubber boots. Wesley, as usual, had on his sneakers. They had sighted the snowy graveyard, and it had been somebody’s idea to walk through it. Wesley had been the first one out of the car, and he had also been the first to sight the broomstick slanted into the ground like a flagpole, with wind chimes hanging from the top of it. It was next to one of the tombstones. There was a deep path leading to it—someone had put it there earlier in the day. It looked crazy—a touch from Mardi Gras, nothing you would expect to see standing in a graveyard. The ground was frozen beneath the snow—the person had dug hard