by Matt Lincoln
“Well, we had to explain to most of them what was going on,” Tessa sighed. “Martha had kept everything from everyone for so long. Most of them knew that something was up because she’s been acting so weird lately, but they definitely didn’t think that anything like this was going to happen.”
“Did any of them explain why they had a gun in the first place?” I asked, remembering the young security guard Jimmy’s heroics back in the library. “I wonder how that kid’s doing, anyway.”
“Oh, he’s out of the woods,” Tessa said brightly as we rounded our path so that we wouldn’t walk straight into the water and headed down along the beach toward the outline of the big house in the distance. “I made sure that the paramedics would text me an update on him. He had to have some surgery, and they airlifted him to a better hospital a ways away, but he’ll be okay.”
“That’s good to hear,” I said honestly, breathing a sigh of relief at this news. If anything had happened to that kid on my watch, I didn’t even know what I’d do.
“As for the gun, Pierce told me that Martha bought it a few months ago and made all the security guards take classes on how to use it if they didn’t know already,” she continued, her arm still linked pleasantly with mine. “That was part of the weird behavior she’s been having lately. Clearly, she was spooked.”
“And it was a good thing, too, at least in that respect,” I chuckled. “I don’t know what we would’ve done if Jimmy hadn’t shown up knowing how to use that gun.”
“Oh, I have a feeling that you would’ve found a way to get us out of it,” Tessa said, smiling wryly at me, and I noticed how her eyes glistened against the backdrop of the ocean. “You always do.”
“Holm sometimes says that one of these days, my luck will run out,” I said, only half-joking. “I worry about that.”
“That’s only the case if it’s actually luck getting you out of jams,” Tessa pointed out. “If it’s skill, it will only run out if you let it.”
“I guess that’s true,” I laughed, reaching over with my free arm and encasing one of her hands in mine.
We continued like that for a while, walking along the shore and enjoying each other’s company. Sometimes we talked, and sometimes we didn’t, just enjoying the easy silence between us.
I figured that if we couldn’t get a whole trip just to ourselves, at least this would have to do.
Eventually, the outline of the house up ahead began to solidify, as it had been blurred by mist over the sea before. When I finally got a good look at it, a chill ran involuntarily up and down my spine, and yet for some reason, I couldn’t tear my eyes off of the house.
It was tall and shrouded in darkness, despite the fact that the sun had yet to set. Somehow it seemed like it was overcast by a long shadow, perhaps because of the dark color on its exterior. The house was made of wood, but the wood was an almost blackened color.
“I can see why kids congregate there on Halloween,” Tessa remarked, and I noticed that we both had stopped dead in our tracks to look up at the house.
“You can say that again,” I said, giving a nervous little laugh.
“So I guess we’ve established that this is the Hawthorne house, not the Carltons,” Tessa smirked, taking a step forward and prodding me to move along with her.
“Yeah, I think that’s safe to say,” I agreed. “Though we’re not going there. Not tonight.”
“Alright, alright,” Tessa said dismissively, rolling her eyes.
We continued to walk until we were at the base of the small cliff on which the Hawthorne house sat. There was a small trail leading up to it from down below.
“Should we go up?” Tessa asked, eagerly taking a step toward the path, but I hesitated, pulling her back involuntarily since our arms were still interlinked.
“I don’t know…” I said cautiously. “I feel like this is private property, and we should keep looking for the Carltons. Paulina said their house is just across the bay from here.”
I looked out at the water, which had really folded into a small bay area from the main ocean as we walked. I couldn’t quite make anything else out in the area, though, as the mist was heavy there.
I took a few steps back toward the water, with Tessa following reluctantly behind me, and squinted harder, shielding a hand over my eyes in an attempt to see better. Finally, I managed to make out the outline of another house on another small cliff set down a bit from where we stood.
“Come on,” I said, grabbing Tessa’s hand and pulling her along with me faster now. “I think I can see it now.”
“Fine,” Tessa said with more than a tinge of annoyance in her tone. “But next time, we’re going up those stairs.”
I ignored this, thinking that I would have to find a way to get the police to come with me on any expedition to the Hawthorne house if I was going to get Tessa off my back.
It took us about ten minutes to reach the other house as we moved slowly through the fog, trying not to lose sight of it. Paulina also wasn’t kidding that the houses were a fair bit apart. I was surprised that the Carltons had anything to complain about, especially given that the sea fog no doubt obstructed their view of the Hawthorne house a fair amount of the time.
When we finally reached the other house, I was relieved to find that it looked much more normal than the first one. It was large, almost impossibly large, but there was nothing creepy about it. It was just a normal house, painted a typical off-white color.
There were steps leading up to this house, as well, but they didn’t appear as rickety or as foreboding as the ones leading up to the Hawthorne house.
“Alright, here goes,” I said, pulling Tessa along with me up the stairs.
“Have you heard from Paulina? Do they know we’re coming?” Tessa asked me.
I reached down and checked my phone, only to find that I wasn’t getting a signal way out there.
“I don’t have a signal,” I said, feeling my brow crease with worry. “So I don’t know. What about you?”
She pulled out her own phone, glanced at it, and shook her head shortly.
“No, me neither,” she said, though she didn’t sound as worried as I did. “I guess we’ll just have to hope they’re okay with us dropping by, then.”
She moved out ahead of me, then, seemingly unconcerned that we were headed onto some stranger’s property mere hours after we’d been shot at, without so much as a cell signal to allow us to call for help if we needed it.
I rested my hand briefly on the gun I kept at my side, reminding myself that it was there and taking solace in that fact before pressing on after Tessa.
At the top of the staircase, we were met by a beautiful, enormous front lawn that was clearly well cared for, stretching back and turning into a small forest around the house and in the backyard where the cliff turned into the mainland.
“Man, would I love to live here,” Tessa grinned, shaking her head at the house. “Wouldn’t you?”
She looked back at me, and I looked up at the place again, stretching out on the edge of the cliff, right next to the sea.
“It’s a bit big for my tastes, but yeah, I think I could manage,” I chuckled, imagining what it would be like to live in a real house so close to the water. That might be the only way I’d give up my houseboat, I decided, if I got to live on the water anyway, for all intents and purposes.
Together, we crossed the long, green front lawn and then stepped up to the door, which had a large brass knocker on it. I knocked on it, but before I even got to the second knock, the door swung open, revealing a short, mousy woman in a pink shawl who looked to be in her late twenties or early thirties.
“Oh, you must be Agent Marston,” she said, smiling up at me with off-kilter nervous energy. “Paulina called about you. We saw you coming up the stairs from the top floor.”
She gestured vaguely upward and then held the door open for us. Her voice was soft and quick, as if she was simultaneously afraid to speak yet anxious to get all the words o
ut.
“Hello, yes, I’m Ethan,” I said, stepping into her front entryway. “And this is my friend, Tessa Bleu. You must be Mrs. Carlton?”
“Yes, yes, please call me Alice,” the woman said, ushering us out of the entryway and into a vast living room area filled with couches and comfy chairs. There was a coffee table set out in front of a green foam couch, decked with tea and cookies and other snacks.
“So Paulina did manage to get ahold of you?” I asked her as Tessa and I sat down on the couch. “We were worried you wouldn’t be expecting us because we walked here from the restaurant, and we lost our cell signals.”
“Oh yes, we spoke to her this afternoon,” Alice said softly as she sat down across from us in a similarly-colored chair and began to pour us all tea. “My husband is just settling the kids in for a movie upstairs so they won’t bother us. He’ll be down soon.”
“How many do you have?” Tessa asked, accepting her tea with a nod of thanks as I did the same.
“Just two,” the woman said, smiling instinctively at the mention of her children. “One girl and one boy, they’re six and eight. They’re a delight, and this really is a great place to grow up.”
“I can imagine,” I chuckled. “I would’ve killed for that backyard when I was a kid.”
“Oh, yes, that,” Alice said, her face falling at the mention of the yard. “Well, they used to love it, at least.”
“What does that mean?” I asked quickly. “Why don’t they like it anymore?”
The woman opened her mouth hesitantly as if trying to decide whether or how to respond, but right then, Alice’s husband came down the staircase tucked far back behind the couch that Tessa and I were sitting on.
“This is my husband, Tyson,” Alice said weakly, gesturing in the man’s direction as he made his way over to us. “Tyson, this is Agent Ethan Marston and his friend, Tessa, the people Paulina called us about.”
“Hey, nice to meet you,” the man said, leaning over the spread on the coffee table and shaking Tessa’s and my hands each in turn before settling in a chair next to his wife.
The man was average height, probably around 5’9, and had shortly cropped blond hair that was receding faintly at the front. He also looked to be in his late twenties to early thirties. He had kind blue eyes, but there were bags beneath them, and there was a kind of weariness in his expression that looked like they had been there for some time.
“Thank you for welcoming us into your home,” Tessa said politely, giving the couple her best smile.
“So,” I said, clapping my hands on my knees. “Paulina said that you guys have been having some trouble with your new neighbors? Why don’t you tell us a bit about that? Or you can start with what you were saying about the backyard if you’d like.”
I’d gotten the sense from the wife that the backyard was a difficult topic, so I wanted to leave it open so that we could ease into that if it made them more comfortable that way. Even so, I was itching to find out what she meant by her original comment on the subject.
“Neighbors,” Tyson scoffed, shaking his head. “If you can call them that.”
“I wouldn’t,” Alice quipped, pursing her lips and taking a small sip from her teacup, which looked precarious to me in her dainty little hands.
“Oh?” Tessa asked, raising her eyebrows at them each in turn. “Why wouldn’t you?”
“Well, they’re not exactly a family, are they?” Tyson asked with a low, humorless laugh, running a hand across his face wearily. “They’re just these random guys who all sleep there and drink all the time.”
“Like a frat house?” Tessa asked, her brow furrowed together in confusion.
“I mean, I guess so,” Alice said, though her face was scrunched up as if this didn’t sound quite right to her. “They’re older, though. And I wouldn’t say they really party. They just lounge around and drink a lot.”
“Do you ever see them doing drugs, anything harder?” I asked, thinking of my last case in the Keys, where there was a similar situation with a property’s new owners turning a house into a literal drug den.
“Oh no, nothing like that,” Alice said, her eyes widening in panic at the thought. “You don’t think they are, are they? I wouldn’t want the kids anywhere near that.”
She looked at her husband desperately, and he reached out and rested a comforting hand on her knee.
“I don’t think so,” I said, only half honestly since I didn’t need these people even more on edge than they already were. “It’s just something that I have to ask. You understand.”
“Right, of course,” Tyson said with a nod of understanding, and Alice looked at least a little less concerned now.
“I have to ask, how is it that you see all of this?” Tessa asked them. “When we walked over here, we could barely see anything with all the fog. Is it not usually this bad?”
“There’s always fog,” Tyson said with a shrug. “But it does ebb sometimes. And we like to take walks along the beach like you did to get here, I assume. The kids love it down there. That’s when we’d see most of this stuff.”
“We stopped taking them, though,” Alice said in a forced tone. “We didn’t want them around those guys.”
“We just got a bad feeling, you know?” Tyson asked, waving a hand in the air. “A hunch. It’s probably nothing, but we didn’t feel right ignoring it since we both felt it.”
“Believe me, I understand,” I assured him. “In my line of work, you learn to trust your gut. It’s usually on to something your conscious mind doesn’t quite get yet.”
Both Tyson and Alice looked more than a little vindicated by this, some muscles in their shoulders relaxing, though not completely.
“That’s what we thought,” Alice said. “The kids complain all the time about it, but we just felt uneasy.”
“How long since you stopped going down by the water?” Tessa asked, taking a small bite out of one of the cookies and glancing over at me as if reminding me that I hadn’t touched my plate.
I quickly picked up one of the cookies and bit out of it so as not to be rude to our hosts. It was pretty good and tasted homemade, so I finished it up in short order and took a second one.
“About three months?” Tyson mused, looking to his wife for confirmation, and she nodded. “The last time we went down there, we ran into one of those guys. We didn’t go back after that.”
“Did you talk to him?” I asked, dropping my second cookie as I looked at the couple with interest. “What was he like?”
“I tried talking to him,” Tyson sighed. “But he wasn’t really in the mood. I asked him about the house, why they bought it, and when they thought the construction might be done. I was just trying to get some information out of him. I tried to make it seem like I was just friendly, though.”
“I thought you were friendly,” Alice told him reassuringly.
“Anyway, he just kind of stared at me and grunted,” Tyson said with a shrug. “He was smoking a cigar on the beach and watching the water. And then he started glaring at Alice and the kids, and that made me uncomfortable, so I stopped trying, and we left. That night, we agreed not to go down there anymore. The whole thing freaked us out too much.”
“I know he didn’t really threaten us,” Alice admitted with a weak smile. “He didn’t do anything at all. We were just uncomfortable. Call us overprotective—my mother does, all the time—but we decided to go with our guts, as you said.”
“You don’t have to explain yourselves to me,” I assured them. “And I get the sense that mothers will always find something to complain about.”
I gave them a wry smile, and they both chuckled.
“You said something about construction?” Tessa asked. “Has that been bothering you?”
“Oh yeah, it’s been going on forever,” Tyson said, an annoyed edge in his voice now. “We expected it when they bought the house, but damn, this is just nuts.”
“It’s been going on for months on end,” Alice added, p
utting her plate down and folding her hands in her lap. Every muscle in her body looked tense. “Hammers and drills and just horrible noise all the time. We thought we might not hear much of it because of the water—it gets loud a lot in this area, which is why we almost never let the kids swim in it, even before. It’s rough out there. But the sound just carries somehow.”
“Interesting,” I murmured, remembering how the police officers had dismissed the idea of the construction noise bothering neighbors because of the distance between the houses and because of the roar of the waves down below. “And this has impacted your ability to live here in peace?”
“Oh, yes,” Alice breathed, straightening out her skirt and looking like she wanted to throw up.
“It’s bothered the kids and Alice the most,” Tyson said, wrapping an arm around his wife protectively. “I’m at work most of the day. And when the kids are at school, it doesn’t bother them. But the sounds even come at night sometimes, and then I hear it, too.”
“Construction in the middle of the night?” I repeated, remembering that Paulina had mentioned something about this, too. “That sounds odd.”
“Yes, it does, doesn’t it?” Tyson asked with a small, almost helpless smile. “That’s part of why I wanted to talk to them so badly. It’s just all so strange. But the guy didn’t offer any explanation, obviously.”
The couple’s demeanor and anxiety were starting to make more sense to me. If I was inundated with noise and surrounded by strangers who didn’t make me feel safe in my own home, I would look and act like I never slept, too.
“Have you thought about moving to get away from it all?” Tessa asked, echoing some of my own thoughts.
The couple exchanged a pained look.
“We’ve talked about it, yes,” Alice admitted with a small, high-pitched sigh.
“I’m hesitant to give up just yet,” Tyson explained, giving his wife another small squeeze around the shoulders. “This is our home, and we worked hard to be able to afford to raise our family in a place like this. If this keeps going on much longer, maybe we’ll seriously consider it. But this is our dream home. I doubt we’d ever be able to find somewhere else more perfect for the kids and us.”
