by J. R. Rain
“She didn’t have a knife, Mommy.” Tammy shakes her head.
“You saw this woman too?” Danny blinks at her.
Tammy bites her ice, making both Danny and me cringe. “Yeah.”
“Please, don’t you ever run off like that again, okay?” I hug her tight.
Danny offers me one of the two remaining cherry ices, his expression softening. “You okay, hon?”
All the air in my lungs blasts out in a heavy sigh. “Yeah. I swear… our daughter is too nice. She’d trust the Devil himself if he said hello.”
A sly grin spreads over my husband’s face. “I can ask Mr. Westfield over for dinner if you want to test that.”
If there’s anyone in this world I’d gladly go to my grave without ever seeing again, it’s Danny’s former boss at the old law firm. “Let’s not.” Ooh. The ice has actual bits of cherry in it. “I’m going to need another weekend at the beach to recover from our weekend at the beach,” I say.
Danny laughs, and we head back to our spot. As much as I try to enjoy the rest of the day, I’m unable to pull my eyes off Tammy and Anthony. I have no explanation for what happened. Tammy saw someone watching me, yet nothing had been there. My parents are all into that spiritualistic crap, and up until a few minutes ago, if anyone had asked me if I believed such a thing as true evil exists―not just ‘politicians screwing over the little guy’ evil―I’d have said no.
Now, I’m not so sure.
Chapter Two
A Little Work
No weekend in the present life of Samantha Moon would be complete without a whole bunch of work. At least the rest of Saturday was relaxing. Sunday morning post-breakfast is a blur. Danny ran off soon after a call from Jeff Rodriguez about a case they’re working on. Evidently, a serious amount of money’s at stake, and he needed to meet with the client today.
Damn.
I can’t complain too much. We need Danny to get paid. Maybe we jumped on the whole house thing a little earlier than prudent, but our old apartment was too small. Tammy had the second bedroom, really a glorified closet, and Anthony’s crib shared our room. We couldn’t put him in Tammy’s room, and no boy wants to grow up sharing a bedroom with his parents. Soon after Danny and Jeff opened their own practice, the naïve belief that he’d essentially won the lotto carried us into a realtor’s place.
Only, that firehose of money never materialized. I’m not doing too bad pay wise; it’s steady at least. Granted, my income is presently more than Danny’s, which has made for more than a few episodes of Moody Hubby. He’s got the potential to make a lot more, but it’s not easy to bootstrap a new law firm up from zero. They’ve poached a few clients that he used to work with from his former firm, and I think he’s had a few referrals from his buddy Mike at the auto body place.
So, yeah. We’re hanging onto the dream, even if we are one unexpected financial crisis away from complete disaster.
Anyway, we managed to swing a pretty good deal on the house. Despite having been a ‘fixer-upper,’ all that backbreaking work is finished a bit over a year after moving in. No one looking at it now would ever be able to guess what the place looked like when we closed. Our single-story home is in a hilly area above Harbor Boulevard. It’s nicely larger than we expected to reach with our budget as well, and a stone’s throw from Hillcrest Park. Four bedrooms worked out perfectly. One each for the kids, a master, and another one that’s become my ‘office’ because it has a sliding glass door. Except for the office, the rest of the rooms are on the tiny side. When we redid the floors, we went for hardwood in the halls and carpet in the rooms, and nice black and white tile floors for the bathrooms. We poured a lot of effort into the place, and it’s become home.
In fact, the only part of this house that I’m not absolutely thrilled with is the detached garage.
It irks me because it happens to contain our washer and dryer, meaning I have to go outside and get rained on to do laundry―just like our days in an apartment when I had to drive to the laundromat. Only now, we had to pay for the machines as well. Fortunately, the day’s clear, and I suppose walking twenty feet still beats a ten-minute car ride. Maybe when money isn’t such a problem, we can have some contractors come in and build a laundry room or something.
Tammy and Anthony zip around our front yard, which is fortunately enclosed in chain link fence. Mary Lou suggested a fun idea for the kids to do next holiday: run colored streamers through the links. Maybe that’ll become our tradition or something. After yesterday at the beach, I barely take my eyes off them while lugging a giant basket of dirty laundry over to the open garage.
My battered pale blue ‘momvan’ sits in the driveway, offset a bit so Danny’s BMW can get in too. He picked it up used. Despite having like three hundred thousand miles on it, the body and interior are in great shape so it ‘looks the part’ for his law career. He could’ve gotten a new Chevy or Ford for what he’s paying on that old Beemer, but he thinks rolling up in a ‘Joe Everyman’ car will make people think he’s a bad lawyer.
I call the kids over to keep them in sight while I load the washing machine. By some miracle, they both come running without protest, though Anthony trips over the side of the driveway and takes a pratfall. He’s got three speeds: standing still, running, and sliding on his face. He shakes it off, giggling, and scrambles in behind his sister, who begins exploring the forest of cardboard boxes filling the garage.
This weekend is the first one since we moved in where we are officially done with renovating. No painting, tiling, patching drywall, installing new sinks, moving crap around, or anything else hanging over us―hence, the beach. Nothing like a few hours absorbing sunlight to melt away stress. Except, what happened yesterday added a whole bunch more.
Once I’ve got the laundry in and the machine running, I walk the kids around to the backyard and set them loose on the sandbox Danny made them. My outdoor lounge chair might be from Walmart, but it’s comfortable. With the kids in view, the whirr of the washing machine in my left ear, and my butt sinking into the (okay, I admit it’s hideous) green and white cushion, I get about as close to perfect as I think possible.
The future’s looking pretty bright, and I’m already wearing shades. We still have a lot of work ahead of us, but the drudgery is behind. Our little place in Fullerton is hardly paradise, but it finally feels like I’ve got a handle on this whole ‘life’ thing.
A grin spreads across my face while I watch my kids building a sandcastle together. For so long, I’ve had this nagging doubt that I scraped by on the help of others. It might’ve taken me ‘til thirty-one to stretch my wings and feel like a real functioning adult, but I’m finally doing it.
Chapter Three
Pushing Paper
Some people think that humanity faces darkness in two inevitable forms: death and taxes. There’s a third inevitable darkness: Mondays.
I often wonder while staring at screen after screen of mind-numbing charts and data if we were better off before the bulk of the population wound up having to work wage jobs to survive. Maybe we had it better living in the days before the nine-to-five, when we hunter/gatherers roamed the planes or people lived in tiny villages with self-sufficient farms and neighbors who not only actually spoke with each other, but knew the names of distant relatives… because they lived just down the road.
On the other hand, they also had short life expectancies and generally wallowed in filth, so maybe a boring office job isn’t so bad after all. It might’ve been slow and relaxing to live like that, but winding up dead because you accidentally nicked your finger while cutting food… yeah, screw that.
A flurry of rapid-fire keystrokes announce my partner, Chad Helling, has either been drawn into an email argument with his girlfriend or he’s taking a routine report way too far. His desk occupies a cube across from mine, amid a sea of almost-eye-level gray fabric walls. The rug between us has this mesmerizing pattern of little squares that will suck the soul straight out of anyone who stares into it
too long. Maybe the carpet is part of the brainwashing my parents are so convinced the government uses.
Before starting here, I expected it to be like those police procedurals from TV where agents and their partners have desks facing each other, in a room full of other agents whose desks face each other, and lots of shouting, cursing, and crude humor. The HUD field office is almost indistinguishable from any typical cube farm, except for the federal logos on the walls and the blackout filters on our computer screens to prevent casual eavesdropping.
Speaking of close to the monitor, I force daydreams of living in a cottage off in the woods somewhere out of my head and get back to the task at hand: routine audits of randomly selected people who are receiving housing assistance. After maybe an hour of that, my cubicle wall creaks.
“You look like you could use some more coffee,” says Chad.
He’s a couple years younger than me, taller, short brown hair in a military brush cut. The man’s athletic and muscular, but always wears loose button-down white shirts that conceal his shape. I only know what he really looks like because he insisted I go to one of his amateur MMA fights. He didn’t have a shirt on for that, and those boxer shorts showed off quite a bit of his legs too. Chad’s no Hercules, but if I’d never met Danny, some sparks might’ve flown between us. As nice as he may be to admire from a distance, he doesn’t hold a candle to the love of my life. Danny might not be able to kick a man ten feet across a ring or lift—well, however much weight Chad can lift—but he’s sweet, caring, intelligent, devoted… and yeah, he’s cute too.
I stop smiling at Danny’s picture to the right of my screen and glance up at my partner. “Yeah. I don’t think there’s enough coffee in the world.”
“Rough weekend?” Chad holds up his mug in a ‘come on, let’s go’ way.
“Just a few minutes of heart-stopping terror. Otherwise, it was pretty relaxing.” My mug dangling from a finger, I follow him down the walkway between cubes to the break room at the end of the row.
“Oh, I gotta hear this,” says Chad.
On the way to the coffee machine and while we pour, I explain Tammy’s disappearing.
Chad chuckles while dumping creamer powder in and stirring. “Kids… Glad it wound up being innocent. Makes the boredom a little nicer.”
“Yeah. I’d much rather be bored here than racing in circles on a beach looking for my missing daughter. Though, it’s been extra boring lately. Feels like I’m in Office Space, only with a gun on my hip.”
Chad laughs. “Not exactly the 007 life you were dreaming about in the academy?”
“Hardly.” I take a sip of java―black―which makes him wince. “At least we’re doing something good here, right?”
He starts for the door. “If you say so.”
“There’s honest people who need help getting by, and not-so-honest people stealing that help.”
Chad stops and leans on the entrance to his cube, slurps coffee, and flares his eyebrows. “You make HUD sound glorious. We’re armed accountants.”
I smirk. “Tell that to Arturo Rosales.”
He cringes. “Okay, fair point… but the DEA doesn’t borrow us that often.”
Speaking of borrow. I need to return Denise’s voicemail asking why I called. The FBI sometimes grabs HUD agents for extra bodies, usually on warrant raids or for search parties. A month on the job, and my butt was tromping around the woods helping hunt for a missing twelve-year-old girl who’d disappeared with her non-custodial father. They’d wound up in our territory all the way from Maine. Sometimes, those cases aren’t so nerve-wracking, but this guy was one of those batshit crazy anti-government gun wonks, and we all thought he’d shoot his daughter and off himself before letting the wife have her back. It had a somewhat-happy ending. The kid had the hell scared out of her, but she’s okay physically. Her dad wasn’t so lucky. We’d all gone in plainclothes, pretending to be ‘lost hikers,’ since this guy would’ve freaked if he saw FBI logos or any kind of uniformed agent. The team who found the cabin and made contact spooked him somehow, and he went for a weapon. It didn’t end well for him.
Anyway, back to my computer.
Hours melt away in an unending cascade of forms. Some of these people’s handwriting is so damn awful I wonder how on Earth they made it out of school. When I hit one where a guy filled out his application with an orange crayon, I’m not sure if I should laugh or feel bad for the man. It’s either a prank or mental issues.
“Hey,” says Chad. “Hungry? It’s like one already.”
“Damn, is it? I’m having so much fun I thought it was almost five.”
He sputters. “I wish. Ready for lunch?”
“Yeah. Need at least an hour of sun or these fluorescents will sap all my vitamins.” I heard that once on Oprah. And I always believe Oprah.
We head out past the security desk and hop in our plain gray government-issue sedan HUD inherited from the FBI a year or two ago. The patched bullet hole in the headrest behind me isn’t what one would call a ‘confidence booster,’ but as far as I know, the agent had been taking cover behind the door at the time. As new agents, we got last pick from motor pool, but it doesn’t bother me the car’s seen better days. My momvan’s about the same, only with about a third the miles as this poor car (and no bullet holes). Shiny and new doesn’t matter to me―that’s Danny’s thing. I prefer stuff that works, appearance be damned.
A couple blocks from the field office, we stop at this sushi place Chad likes. It helps that they run a lunch special menu, which makes it a frequent destination. Raw fish isn’t really my scene, but I suppose anyone living in California these days has to at least be able to tolerate it in small doses if they ever want to go out with friends. Fortunately, they’ve got hot food as well.
After ordering my usual nabeyaki udon lunch, (basically chicken noodle soup with some extra bells and whistles―the egg floating in it is probably why I love it so much) I call Mary Lou. The phone rings for a while and dumps to voicemail. Huh? That’s odd… She’s watching the kids, so she should have her phone close by. Hmm. Maybe she’s in the bathroom.
Chad and I gripe about the endless sea of paperwork, and this slimeball, Curtis Price―our first major success. He’d applied for and gotten fully-subsidized HUD housing under a false name while claiming to be a disabled veteran. In reality, the man earned close to a million a year as a music promoter, and used the house as a place to ‘entertain’ his artists. He’s still living rent-free off the government, but his room’s much smaller now.
I dial Mary Lou again, and Ellie Mae, her six-year-old, answers. She’s given all her kids ‘double names’ like hers. Ellie’s the eldest. She whispers, “Hi Aunt Sam.”
What’s with the whispering? Kids do weird things sometimes. “Hey, sweetie. Are you guys having fun?”
“No.” Ellie Mae sounds sad and frightened. “Mommy’s making us hide ‘cause someone bad’s outside.”
I blink. “What? Someone bad? Are you okay?”
Chad stops chewing and stares at me. “That doesn’t sound good.”
My ‘yeah, I know’ stare makes him put his chopsticks down and lean closer to listen. “What’s your mom doing right now?”
“She’s on the 911,” whispers Ellie Mae. “We’re s’posed ta be quiet.”
Anthony’s babbling starts up in the background with Tammy and Billy Joe (my sister’s four-year-old son) shushing him.
“What did you see?” I ask.
“Mommy told us to hide in here and be quiet,” whispers Ellie Mae.
The squeak of a door comes over the line, then the rustle of a cell phone being handed off.
“Sam?” asks my sister, her voice quivering.
“I’m here, Mary Lou. I can be there in five minutes. What’s going on?”
She breathes into the phone for a few seconds like she’s trying to calm down. “I thought there was someone prowling around the house. They’re gone now. I called the police, and they’re sending a car by to check.”
“They won’t find anything,” says Tammy in the background.
My heart races.
“What?” asks Mary Lou.
I can just picture Tammy giving my sister the creepy-calm stare. “That bad lady doesn’t make footprints.”
“Uhh.” Mary Lou sounds like she’s on the verge of a panic attack.
“Mary… can you let me talk to Tammy for a sec?”
The phone changes hands without a word.
“Hi, Mommy,” chirps Tammy.
Chad tilts his head, a look of concern in his eyes. “You okay? You’re going pale.”
“Yeah, it’s nothing,” I mutter to him while covering the phone. “Tam… did you see that same woman?”
“Yes, Mommy. But it’s okay. She made a face at Aunt Mary Lou like you smellin’ what Daddy did in the bathroom, an’ went away.”
I’m not sure if I should laugh or commit myself to a full-on panic attack. This doesn’t make any sense at all. “Okay, sweetie. I’ll see you in a couple hours, ‘kay?”
“Okay,” she chimes. “I love you, Mommy.”
“Love you too, Tam Tam.”
“Say hi to Mommy,” mumbles Tammy.
Distorted babbling tells me Anthony’s chewing on the cell phone while attempting to speak. Mary Lou takes the phone back and asks in a shaky voice, “What was she talking about? What woman?”
“Umm.” I’d dismiss it as a kid thing, but my daughter’s imaginary friend shouldn’t have made me feel like death itself stared at me. I run through a quick explanation of the black shape she described from the beach. My daughter couldn’t tell me if the woman was old or young, or even what her face looked like, more a silhouette of wispy darkness with a human shape and piercing white eyes. How that kid isn’t having nightmares, I have no idea. Where did she get that image from? Of course, she made it up. Right?
“Oh.” Mary Lou laughs off her fear. “I probably saw some of the neighborhood teens cutting across yards. I don’t know why it spooked me so much.”
