The Lucky Ones(38)

“See?” he said. “You’re safe with me. Come on. I’ll show you the freak show.”

“The freak show?” Allison asked as she tucked the pepper spray into her pocket.

Deacon pointed at something. All Allison saw was a large white sheet draped over what she assumed was a huge stack of boxes.

“We cleaned out Dad’s office after he retired and put everything up here. Including his ‘collection.’” Deacon pushed the curtain aside and Allison stared, wide-eyed, at three dark wood glass-front cabinets. She looked at Deacon, who said nothing but waved his hand as if to say “you asked for it, here it is.” She leaned in and peered through the glass. Inside on beds of midnight blue velvet lay various metal objects in strange, fascinating and grotesque shapes. They were not shiny, not polished, not gleaming. These were old things, tarnished things, some with rust on them that on second look revealed it was not rust at all.

“What the hell is all this stuff?” Allison asked, intrigued and horrified by the macabre display in front of her.

“What do you do when you have too much money, too much free time and not enough good sense?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“That’s a bone wrench,” Deacon said, pointing at an F-shaped steel object about ten inches long. “Don’t ask me why you’d need to wrench a bone, but that’s what it is. And that thing next to it that looks like a wine bottle corkscrew is, in fact, a trephine.”

“A what?”

“A trephine? It’s, um, for drilling holes in the skull.”

“Oh, gross,” she said, wincing.

“I know, right? This is the best one, though,” Deacon said as he pointed out an object that looked something like a wooden rolling pin with a rounded tip and split down the center.

“What is that thing?”

“You can’t guess?” he asked.

“Please tell me that’s not a wooden dildo.”

“Close. It’s a speculum,” he said, grinning.

“Made of wood?”

“It’s been sanded and shellacked.”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

Deacon grinned maniacally. “It’s got a leech applicator, too.”

“Oh, my God.” Allison covered her mouth with her hands and laughed in disgust and horror.

“I wasn’t kidding about the freak show,” Deacon said.

“Dr. Capello collects this stuff? By choice? On purpose? No one is making him?”

“This is medical history right here.” Deacon waved his hand, indicating the cabinets. “Insanely gross and fucked-up medical history. We’ve got a tonsil guillotine here. A set of forceps as big as your arms here. And, oh, this little guy is a gold-plated eyelid retractor. Are you ready to puke yet?”

“A tonsil guillotine?”

“Chop, chop,” Deacon said.

“Yes, I’m ready to puke.”

“I told you you’d regret it,” Deacon said.

“I need to sit down,” Allison said, mostly kidding. Deacon had warned her, after all. As gross as the stuff was, she found it pretty fascinating. Fascinating and gross.

Deacon threw open a large steamer trunk and pulled an old quilt out of it, tossed it on the floor and sat down cross-legged. Allison sunk down next to him.

“Dad is weird,” Deacon said.

“I had no idea.”

Deacon laughed. “Blame his grandparents,” he said.

“Vicious Victor and Crazy Daisy?”

“Yeah. Dad found a bunch of his grandparents’ stuff up here in the attic when he came back the first time. Including some of the stuff they used on her. Including...” Deacon crawled to one of the cabinets and pointed at the object inside. “That ice pick.”

“Ice pick?”

“Up the nose and into the prefrontal lobe,” Deacon said. “Didn’t work very well. Supposed to make her less moody. Instead she was pretty much catatonic after that.”

Allison shuddered at the sight of the thin metal rod and its tapered tip. She couldn’t stop thinking about how it had once been shoved into a suffering woman’s brain.

“That wasn’t in the article I read,” Allison said.

“The one on Dad’s wall? Trust me, there’s a lot that’s not in that article,” Deacon said, rolling his eyes. “But you know what they say—don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. A catatonic woman being choked to death by her own husband as a sort of mercy killing is a bit much for the Lifestyle section of your friendly neighborhood newspaper.”

“He choked her to death?” Allison said.

“Choked her with his bare hands,” Deacon said. “Then he blew his brains out with his pistol. Fun story, right?”

“And Dr. Capello wanted to keep all that old medical stuff of hers?” Allison asked. “I think I would have thrown it all away.”

“It’s part of his family’s history,” Deacon said. “Plus, collecting antiques is like getting tattooed. You tell yourself you’re going to keep it small and simple and then a year later...” Deacon held out his bare arms to show off his tattoos, stylized Chinese black dragons that twined from his back over his shoulders and all the way down his arms.