Free The Town by Bentley Little Page A

toward the bathroom at the rear of the bar.
    Gregory and Odd sat for a moment in silence, sipping their respective drinks.
    “You’ve lived here for a while, haven’t you?” Gregory asked.
    “All my life.”
    “You wouldn’t happen to know whatever became of the Megans, would you? The ones who used to own our place?”
    Odd frowned.
    “Did they move or—?”
    “They’re dead,” the old man said.
    Gregory stared at him and blinked.
    “Bill Megan shot his family. Killed ’em all, then turned the gun on himself.”
    Odd answered his next question before he even asked it. “In their bedrooms,” he said. “Murdered ’em while they slept.”
     
    He needed alcohol after that.
    He ordered one beer, then another, and finally finished off a third before stopping.
    “You’re living in the old Megan place?” Paul said after he returned from the bathroom and Odd told him. He whistled. “Brave.”
    “I didn’t know I was being brave. I didn’t know anything had happened.”
    Odd looked disgusted. “Who sold you that house?” he asked. “No, let me guess. Call. Call Cartright.”
    Gregory nodded.
    “It’s against Arizona law to sell a place without informing the buyer that there’s been a murder there, but Call’d sell his own sister to cannibals if there was a penny to be had, so it don’t surprise me none.” He squinted up at Gregory. “You could sue his ass, you know. Get out of the contract. You don’t want that house, you can—”
    “No, we want it, all right.”
    Paul frowned. “Why, in God’s name?”
    “Well, for one thing, we’re all moved in, we just got settled. I don’t want to have to look around for another house, move again, and go through all that stress. Besides, I don’t believe in ghosts—”
    “Who does?” Paul said. “But it’s just the thought that all that shit happened where your kids are sleeping, where your wife takes a bath, where you eat breakfast. Hell, I’d be thinking about it all the time. I’m not superstitious or anything, but that doesn’t mean I want to buy Jeffrey Dahmer’s refrigerator and store my milk in it. It’s sick.”
    Odd nodded. “Besides, that’s why the last people moved out. They heard things.”
    “Things?”>
    “I don’t know if it was their imagination or what, but the people said there were knocking sounds in the middle of the night. And voices. I don’t know whether it was real ghosts or just their own minds playing tricks on them, but whatever the cause, they couldn’t stay there.” He paused. “Sometimes the demons in your head are worse than anything outside.”
    “We haven’t heard anything,” Gregory said.
    “Yet.”
    He smiled. “Yet.”
    “Just the same . . .”
    “I’ll admit it’s not something I really wanted to hear. And I would’ve been much happier if no one had told me. But I’m not going to panic and pull up stakes and disrupt my entire life because of it. Hell, someone’s probably died in almost every old house.”
    “Just the same . . .” Paul said.
    “Well, keep it to yourself,” Odd suggested. “Don’t tell your family. That’s my advice. What they don’t know can’t hurt ’em.”
    Gregory nodded and thought of his mother blessing the house before they could go in, cleansing it of evil spirits. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Maybe you’re right.”

2
    The Molokan church hosted a welcoming get-together, an end-of-the-summer barbecue with steak and shashlik. Gregory was mingling and talking with people he hadn’t seen in years—mostly the parents of childhood church friends, who seemed to be the only Russians who had not moved away. His mother was in heaven, the center of attention, laughing happily and talking loudly, more animated than Julia had ever seen her.
    Julia herself felt slightly out of it. She smiled and chatted and pretended to be enjoying herself, but the truth was that she had never liked these sorts of functions, and the unwritten Molokan mandate that every