Decatur by Patricia Lynch Page A

from the inside of the door leading to the downstairs apartment. Marilyn bounded up the stairs, “Sssh, Sssh. Rowley, no barking.”
    In a flash she had her own door open and she knelt down and buried her face into the dog’s white diamond marking on his chest. Rowley’s eyes were tawny and they looked in a not unfriendly way over Marilyn’s head to Max, sizing him up. She flipped a light on and before Max could come in she had a leash in her hand and had tossed her fake leather handbag on a sofa with a fringed orange cover.
    Back on the street with Rowley on the leash they crossed North Street and made their way over to the more graceful homes on West William Street leading to Charlesworth Place. Marilyn liked to pretend that this was really where she lived in Decatur, Illinois. There were elm, oak and pine trees planted here, large lawns with big borders of peony bushes along the red and yellow brick houses and, as you got to Charlesworth Place, a Frank Lloyd Wright home on the corner. Marilyn let Rowley off the leash to scamper in the park-like atmosphere of the grounds of the Charlesworth mansion, a late Victorian brick beauty with a square tower, a sweeping graveled circular drive and beautiful wrought iron streetlights marking the entrance with big white globes of light.
    “You ever been here?” asked Marilyn, “It’s me and Rowley’s favorite place except for maybe Fairview Cemetery.”
    “You can just go in?” Max asked. “Isn’t it private property?”
    “I don’t know. I guess maybe now it’s the University’s but every night after work it’s me and Rowley’s.” The dog, hearing his name, ran up to Marilyn and barked happily, glad to be out of the apartment with the wet grass brushing his ankles and the smell of her in his nostrils along with a satisfying moosh of neighborhood dog pee, broken robin’s egg, and the flowering big magnolia in front of the closed-up house.
    “Some people think this place is haunted,” she offered as the moon came out of the clouds just above the top turret of the mansion.
    “And you?” Max asked as she whistled for Rowley.
    “I’ve seen things here. My mother used to clean house for J.J., the son of the Charlesworth that built this place along with your college. Mother always called him an odd duck. She was right. It was like he was stuck between the centuries, wearing an old fashioned morning jacket and big black bow tie. He collected peculiar things from all over the world and was very particular about them.” She paused biting her lip and then plunged on, “His young wife committed suicide when I was eight.”
    “That’s sad.” Max said looking at the big house and thinking you just never knew what went on inside of people’s heads.
    “She was found drowned in the goldfish pond only they called it something else, something classy sounding.”
    “She drowned in a koi pond?” Max supplied.
    “That’s it. It was a big pond. I’ll show you, around the back. C’mon, Rowley.” She called and the dog fell in immediately at her heel. They moved in the moonlight to the rear of the mansion with its big darkened rear porch looking out over a large expanse of lawn in shades of grey illuminated by the moon and the house’s Victorian street lamps. The dog and Marilyn moved with easy familiarity towards the center of the lawn where a large deep hole ringed with stones stood. The koi pond was easily twenty feet wide and even with the bottom layered in leaves and twigs, looked to be seven or eight feet deep. Marilyn could feel the seeping darkness of the Charlesworth mansion strongest there except for the one place inside, the place she never got back to.
    “He had it drained when she died,” Marilyn said softly looking down into the pond’s dry stone bottom. “I told you J.J. was odd; his father was a real Bible thumper, but J.J., he had a fascination with what he called the other side of the divine. Went all over the world collecting things that I think