Dell

"I happened to be in the neighborhood, so I thought I'd drop by."

Not a line that gets you in the door no questions asked, Dell knows. Not on this street in this drab urban wasteland where the city swallowed the neighborhood whole and moved on, leaving a trail of ruined streets flanked by overgrown parking lots and tin sheds and mutilated houses — all but the one he is approaching.

He is here for a reason. Whenb they returned his clothes the day the doctors cleared him, the pockets were empty except for this index card. It fell out of the sagging tweed jacket stuffed into the top of the plastic bag. It reads,

553 MAY STREET JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA

It's all he has of his past life. This and the flash drive. The thing slid out of his shoe while he was dressing, so sleek that his first instinct was to smash the object like a scorpion. Instead he shoved it into the jacket; he got dizzy looking at it, and it wasn't just the head injury. He couldn't throw it away; he couldn't have it in his life. By the time it ate its way through the lining, he'd collected so much stuff that he had a dozen places to stash it. He needs to bury the damn thing.

Maybe here, at this address.

Something about 553 shouts, home, although it looms like a dowager queen waiting for him to explain himself. With its fluted columns and French windows coated with grit, the once white house looks like Tara, all used up and kicked to the curb. The row of trees to the right does nothing to hide the dented metal shed on the seedy parking lot that replaced another big house. To its left, a brick veneer front with combination windows hangs like a mask on an ex-mansion, with external fire escapes clamped on the sides to bring it up to code. A sign sunk in the green cement signifying lawn reads: MARVISTA.

Apartments, boardinghouse or crack motel? He doesn't know. Is this even the right neighborhood? He rubs the grit off a brass plate bolted to the gate in front of Tara here. It reads: 553 May Street, and underneath, Ellis. Reflexively, he fingers the frayed index card he's carried ever since the doctors signed off on him and the cab company settled his bill. He left the hospital in clothes returned in the regulation plastic bag marked with his room number. The frayed tweed jacket, the shirt, the canvas boots looked strange to him. It's all strange. The taxi that hit him knocked everything out of his head.

Fretting, he went through the pockets: no wallet, no ID, no glasses, just an unmarked envelope stuffed with small bills — payoff, he supposes — and this index card with the address in black ballpoint. He's carried it for so long and studied it so closely that he doesn't need to look.

Yep. This is the place.

Dell can't tell you exactly why he's at the Ellis family's front gate. Unless he won't. He is either a godsend or a threat to the women living in the house, and. This is bad. He doesn't know which. The taxi knocked everything out of his head except the guilt.

Dell is not his real name. He grabbed this one off the wall like a hat off a hook. "Dell," he told the others holed up in the gulch below the overpass where he bedded down when he reached Jacksonville. You don't just walk in and put down your stuff without some kind of introduction. He liked the way it sounded. No last name. Dell was good enough for them. Look at it this way. Who, temporarily sleeping in a mess of cartons, wants to give up his particulars to guys who might give him up to the guys out looking for him.

"My name is Dell." Dell what? To be determined. It's past time to pick up a last name and put it on. No point scoring new ID until he can pay for that fake license, fake SSN, but still. He's highly qualified, but he hasn't had a real job since the accident. He used to be good at what he did. Tech, he thinks, but the details blurred somewhere between there and here. Situational amnesia?

Look. There are things a man needs to forget. He doesn't really want to talk about the psychic train wreck that spilled him out here in the shadow of the interstate, where he showers at the Y as often as he can and takes care of the rest whenever. Not yet. Maybe the rest will come back to him when he penetrates this old ark.

If he really wants to know who he is, and that's what bothers him.

Open the damn gate, stupid, go up on their fancy steamboat porch and knock on that door like a man, and when they ask you in, let them tell you what you're doing here. Check out the interior through that beveled glass and work on your damn smile while you wait for them to come. Smile. Whoever you used to be, people liked you. Talk your way in.

Then what? Not sure.

Dell may not know why he's here, but he spent weeks researching the occupants before he marched out today. The Ellis family owns 553. Have done ever since Dakin Ellis, the paterfamilias or whatever, broke ground in 1888 and built this heap for his new wife. It's in all the city directories between then and now, and he checked every one. It gave him a sense of purpose. He moved on to a library PC with greasy keys, searched every Web reference to the family and followed up with visits to local historical societies, museums, decaying files in the belly of the Jacksonville Journal.

Procrastinating? Pretty much.

Jacksonville pioneers, the Ellises, one of the city's first families, with too many men lost to notable accidents and untimely deaths. In its own way that's creepy, and the creepiest thing? Their old world shifted and the neighborhood went from seedy to dangerous, but there are three old women still in the house like clueless passengers wondering why all the deck chairs are sliding downhill. He needs to get in there and find out what brought him to this old ark.

And he can't get past the ornamental iron gate. It isn't locked. It's him.

Dell backs into the shade of their big live oak and considers. Scope the territory, he decides. Look for a way in and when you find it, leave. Let the rest come later.

It had damn well better!

He didn't expect to be in Jacksonville this long. He slouched into this overgrown city months ago, looking to locate the address on this card and figure out what comes next. Instead he retreated into research, the perfect paradigm for what he is right now: all movement, no action. In late summer it was like walking the ocean bottom with the whole Atlantic on his back. Fall here was easy but in northern Florida, even winter is harder than he thought. It never snows, at least he doesn't think it does, but it's too cold to sleep in the elbow of the overpass. The other guys moved out weeks ago but until last night, he temporized. It was the first frost.

Even his teeth got cold. Whatever he has to do inside this old heap, he'd better get started. He enters through a gap in the hedge and darts for the ornamental shrubs below the long front porch with its grimy rockers and dead plants overflowing cement urns. The jumble of hibiscus and bougainvillea is so thick that a person coming out the front door might or might not hear something, but she won't see him running along below. He rounds the corner and drops into a crouch, looking for a basement window. He won't know that the first Dakin Ellis built this place like a plantation house in flood country, with an unbroken foundation: proof against high tides on the St. Johns River — in sinkhole territory, which Dakin didn't know.

Safely behind the house,...