“Because I’m working, Rick. Stop following me!”
“But we ain’t done with our talk yet.”
“Yes, we are! There’s no way in hell I’m moving in with you.”
“It’s what makes the most sense, Anna.” Rick spread his arms like he was explaining that water was wet.
“The most sense? For what? So you don’t have to go to Lucky’s for a booty call?”
“Ha! You stopped puttin’ out after Desiree was born.”
“I’d just had a baby, for God’s sake.”
“Yeah, but I need me my five sons so as we can go hunting when they’d grown up.”
“Five? Like hell! It’s a vagina, not a clown car. Do you have any idea how much it hurts to deliver a child?”
“That’s your job, woman.”
Anna raised her hands and shook them at the empty sky. It took her a minute to regain the ability to talk. “Oh. My. God. I cannot have this discussion with you. I am not some wench put on God’s earth to just make babies!”
Rick cocked his head for a moment, as if caught off guard by a wayward sex fantasy. “Wait. You sayin’ you’ll put out so long as you don’t get preggo?”
Nate could not see Anna’s expression clearly, but judging by how Rick took a step backward it must have been one hell of molten ugly.
“Shit, that’s not what this is about anyway.” Rick started to pace back and forth, repositioning his argument. “You’re just too far away from where I’m all set up. It’s about geometry.”
Anna hunched forward in puzzlement. “You mean, geography?”
“That’s what I said, woman!”
Nate could see Anna’s fists shaking from the porch. She wasn’t exactly shouting but it was clear she was struggling to control her temper. Nate flipped his laptop closed and trotted down the front steps. He wasn’t sure exactly what he was doing. But his instincts told him he should lend his presence to this discussion and see if it helped defuse things.
“Rick—you’re the one who set up out in the boonies. I’ve lived in the same house for five years.”
“We need to be together,” Rick was insisting. “How else is Des going to see me?”
“By you following the visitation schedule.”
“But that’s not good for her. She needs a man in her daily life.”
Nate stopped a few feet away from her. Anna’s head whipped around and he caught her eye.
“Hi there,” Nate said.
Anna got a sly look. Turning to Rick, she hiked her thumb and said, “By the way, did you meet Nate? My boyfriend?”
Rick’s head shook as if he was having a convulsion. Then he squinted at Nate before his face slackened into some kind of death stare.
Oh, shit. Should have stayed on the porch.
The squint softened into a mere glare, and Rick began to stalk around in a wide circle. He was about six inches taller than Nate, hard and lean, wearing the clothes of a man who worked for a living. The dirty ball cap pulled down on his forehead only accentuated the hatred in his eyes.
Rick stopped pacing. After studying Nate in silence, he swung his gaze back to Anna. The hatred didn’t dissipate.
“I see,” he said, his voice ice. “Been doing some whoring?”
“How dare you,” Anna hissed.
Their eyes spewed daggers at each other.
Rick took a menacing step toward her.
“You know, Rick?” Nate said. “What you’re doing is illegal.”
Both heads swiveled.
“Harassment in the first degree is when you intentionally and repeatedly follow a person in or about a public place, and engage in conduct which places such a person in reasonable fear of physical injury,” Nate explained. “That’s a Class B Misdemeanor, but if you keep doing it, it can escalate into a felony.”
Those ex-husband eyes bored through Nate’s soul.
“Are you threatening me, boy?”
“No. You’re threatening yourself.”
Rick puzzled through the meaning of this exchange. He wasn’t getting it.
“You. Are. Threatening. Anna. And. Therefore. Committing. Harassment.”
Rick squinted. “You calling me stupid?”
The answer was quickly becoming yes, but Nate decided differently in what he should verbalize. “Um. No.”
Anna spoke up, this time in a calm but assertive voice. “He’s saying that you need to stop following me and being disruptive. A misdemeanor would not fit well with your parole.”
At the mention of parole, Rick stiffened. The cognitive dissonance was on full display. Rick’s emotions clearly wanted to lash out in aggression while his pea brain advised against it. Nate imagined what the mental exchange must have sounded like. One hundred percent chance it was taking place in a stilted, Duck Dynasty-sort of backwoods vernacular.
Then without a word, Rick stepped slowly back to his truck. He opened the door, climbed up, started the engine, and drove cautiously off. Not once in the whole process did he take his eyes off of Nate.
Nate let out a long sigh. He hadn’t realized he had been holding his breath.
“Thank you,” Anna said.
He looked at her. The hard expression on her face had thawed.
“Sure.”
“I’m so, so sorry Nate. I didn’t mean to drag you into this.”
“This is what friends do,” Nate replied.
Anna gave him a sheepish smile.
“Boyfriend, huh?” he asked.
Anna looked embarrassed. “That was off the cuff. Sorry.”
“No problem. That was quite the confrontation there.”
She smiled her little smile again. “Ever since he moved that trailer of his out into the woods—forty miles away from civilization, I might add—we’ve had a lot of scheduling issues with his visitation. He wants to drop the whole burden on me. He keeps stalking me. If he put half as much energy into Des as he did trying to weasel out of doing any logistics.…”
“Things would be a lot easier?”
“Yeah.”
There was a short, awkward silence as the two of them studied the grass.
“You want to come in for a minute?” Nate offered. “Matt’s picking up more lumber, so it’s just me. I can put some coffee on.”
“Sure, I’d love—” Anna’s face suddenly grew panicked as she looked at her bare wrist. “My watch. What time is it?”
Nate had to pull out his phone. “A quarter past ten.”
“Oh, shit.” She immediately started fumbling for her keys before she realized they were still in her car. “I had an appointment at ten. Damn it! I’m sorry, Nate.”
He sighed with disappointment. “That’s okay. Next time.”
“I’m really sorry,” she repeated, and placed her hand on Nate’s chest. “Definitely next time.”
Nate watched as Anna got back in her car and executed some sort of NASCAR Dukes of Hazzard loop-de-loop turn. Clouds of dirt spewed into the air as her Honda disappeared back down the road.
Next time. When would he see her again? Hopefully, it was soon.
Nate settled back in on the porch and did some more laptop work. After a half hour or so, the idea of coffee started to sound really good, so Nate dragged himself back into the kitchen. He cleared out the previous pot and decided while the new pot was brewing that he might as well clear out his own insides to make room. Since the downstairs bathroom was all torn up, Nate trudged up the staircase to the second floor.
He hurried down the hall, extra conscious of the pressure in his bladder now. As he stepped into the upstairs bathroom, he fumbled in the dim light to flip the switch and started unzipping his pants.
Then Nate froze.
The room was trashed. Great tears slashed vertically through the wallpaper, ending near a hole that looked like it had exploded from the floor. Mud and blood caked the tile and flies circled over the filth. The room reeked as if someone hadn’t flushed the toilet for days. But that wasn’t all.
Writte
n all over the bathroom wall were giant, dripping red letters straight out of a horror movie. The message was simple and direct.
LEAVE.
13
Nate spent the next hour sitting in his car, parked a quarter mile away and staring at the house.
The message affected him greatly. Who had written the bloody word? Rick? It was kind of juvenile but seemed to fit the mental profile. After Anna had called Nate her boyfriend, Nate could totally see how an ex-husband with Rick’s intellectual acuity might act out in a petty prank and tell the new suitor to get out of Dodge. Could Rick have doubled back and snuck into the house?
A couple issues existed with this theory. First of all, there hadn’t been much time to do it. Rick would have had to park far away, sneak up from the far side of the house, enter an unknown floorplan, deliberately target the bathroom upstairs, drop all the blood and mud and gunk (where would he have found it?), and then sneak out.
Second, as simple as LEAVE was, Nate wasn’t sure Rick could spell it.
But the biggest theory buster was Adolf. The big Doberman lay asleep on the front couch—a regular occurrence now that Nate fed him regularly. Adolf was a mean bastard when it came to strangers, and he surely would have barked, growled, or caused bloody dismemberment if Rick had snuck into the house. Adolf barely even liked Shelby, and that was only because he wanted to shag Missus Biscuits.
Nate started thinking. Had Shelby done it as a prank? His neighbor loved to gossip and tell stories, but vandalism didn’t seem his thing.
Maybe Matt had marked up the mirror? Was the scrawl actually in reference to some kind of carpentry—maybe, “leave this mirror here” instead of “remove and pitch in the dumpster?”
That didn’t seem likely. Matt hadn’t marked up any other parts of the mansion. Plus, he seemed more like a Sharpie sort of guy.
Was the house actually haunted?
The hairs on the back of Nate’s neck stood on end.
No, that couldn’t be. Nate didn’t believe in stuff like that. He wasn’t renovating some remote ski lodge with a hedge maze out back and Scatman Crothers calling from Miami. There wasn’t any redrum going on here. That was absurd.
Or was it?
Nate shuddered.
But he had to figure this out.
He drove slowly back toward the front porch and exited his Altima in an extreme act of bravery. The front parlor was easily visible through the open temporary door Matt had recently installed.
“Adolf!”
The Doberman opened one suspicious eye from his couch, as if he knew it was too early for dinner.
“Come on, boy. I need your help.”
He closed his eye again, having failed to hear the words food or eat.
Steeling himself, Nate stalked inside and retrieved a paring knife from the kitchen—not scary, but all he could find. Then back in the parlor he smacked Adolf on the rump repeatedly. With great reluctance, the Doberman stretched and reported for duty. Nate led him up the grand staircase past the three oil paintings of antebellum glory. The upstairs hall at the top stretched from one end of the mansion to the other. Carefully, cautiously, Nate crept down the corridor with the paring knife out in front of him.
They reached the bathroom. Nate took a couple deep breaths and leaned around the edge of the door frame.
The writing was gone.
Nate was dumbfounded.
Adolf was annoyed. He plopped down and started licking himself.
Where did the words go? The message? It had been oozing off the wallpaper, wet and sloppy and red. The puddle of blood that had pooled on the floor tile? Missing. The slashes in the wallpaper, seemingly delivered by a giant claw? Repaired.
Was Nate losing his mind?
He had seen the warning, he was sure of it. But yet, here he was, looking at the same room and everything was fine. It just didn’t make sense.
Nate backed away, still facing the doorway. Once he was a good twenty feet away from the bathroom, he turned and ran back downstairs.
Matt arrived just after lunch with a new batch of supplies. By this time Nate had calmed down at what he was sure had been just some weird hallucination. He had seen the old furnace Matt was fixing up. It was ancient. Maybe Nate had just suffered from some sort of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Nate came out to greet Matt at his pickup. “Hey, need some help?”
“Hey, dude. How are we doing so far?”
“Grea—uh, good. I think.” He glanced at the back bed of Matt’s giant pickup. It was full of boxes, pipes, and some kind of welding contraption with an attached tank. “That’s quite a truckload.”
“Still working on the plumbing, dude,” Matt drawled. “This is an old house. Lots of lead pipes to get rid of.” He was rummaging underneath his front seat.
“Lead pipes?”
“Yup.”
“Aren’t those toxic or something?”
“Yup.”
Is that the reason I’m seeing things? Nate thought about the possibility of lead poisoning.
Matt muttered something that sounded like a-ha and produced a plastic sack with the words Pet Depot on it. He closed his truck door. “You still got Adolf on a chain, or is he running around free these days?”
“More like sleeping free. No, he’s off his chain.”
“Yo, Adolf!” Matt shouted. “Got something for ya, boy!”
They waited a few moments until a groggy Doberman appeared in the front doorway.
Matt produced a dog chew from the plastic bag. “Here, boy!”
Adolf perked up and walked briskly out into the front yard. A few tentative sniffs and he took the chew from Matt’s hand. He trotted off to the edge of the house.
Nate nodded appreciation. “That ought to last him a while. It was two feet long.”
“Well, I figured he could use something to keep him busy. Bully sticks are good for that.”
“What’s a bully stick?”
“Dehydrated bull penis.”
“It’s what?”
“Bull penis.”
“You’re kidding,” Nate said.
Matt stared at him impassively through his glasses like he was a simpleton.
Nate scowled. “I just—I had no idea they used that part of the animal.”
“They use every part they can,” Matt said as he opened the tailgate.
Adolf coughed. The Doberman stood back up and hauled the bully stick around the corner. Nate watched with morbid appreciation. “Damn, that thing is huge.”
Matt handed Nate a cardboard box full of pipe fittings. “Well, if you’re a bull, your life outlook pretty much consists of becoming a ribeye. I guess God wanted them to have some fun while they could.”
“I guess.” Nate started to walk to the house. “I think I’ll stick to cat toys.”
“Oh, I got some stuff for Gilligan too. Cans of wet food and a little ball filled with catnip. Hope that’s okay.”
“That’s awesome. Thanks for thinking of them.”
“Gotta feed the family, right?”
The rest of the afternoon proceeded uneventfully. Nate even followed Matt up to the mystery bathroom. It looked normal—until Matt tore out big holes in the plaster and started cutting the pipes. Nate assisted by ferrying supplies back and forth to wherever Matt was working. Adolf finished off his bully stick and then leaped back onto His Spot on the couch in the front parlor. Gilligan even participated in the social and constructive dynamic, although he still had a strange habit of staring at nothing and meowing at it.
“You sure you don’t want me to go ahead and do the pipes in that other bathroom up here?” Matt asked.
“No—I think I got it. That bathroom is my project. I need to learn how to do this stuff if I’m going to ever flip another house.”
“You really think you’re going to flip another house?” Matt said.
“Sure.”
“Huh,” was all Matt said in reply.
Evening came and Matt left for the day. Nate
was once again alone. Even sitting downstairs with his laptop, he couldn’t stop thinking about the bathroom incident.
Gilligan pestered him to follow into the kitchen, where an empty food bowl and water dish indicated The End of the World to a cat. Nate refilled both and produced a glass for himself. He started to fill it from the sink and suddenly stopped.
“Lead pipes. I guess I shouldn’t be drinking the water, huh, Gilligan?”
Meow.
“Right.” Nate pulled the fridge open and gazed upon the array of beer bottles. Coors Light was fine for hot work during the day but evenings demanded something a little heartier. “Abita?”
Meow.
“Yes. Abita it is.”
One beer led to five. The evening was cool and Nate opened the windows as the sun faded to dusk. He should have been able to sit back and enjoy himself, but once again his brain started spinning out of control about the eerie message he had imagined.
LEAVE.
In blood.
“I need some music, Gilligan.”
The cat rubbed himself against his shin.
Nate gave him a few scratches and then connected his phone to the Jambone. The wireless speaker brick chirped at the successful connection. “The best thing about Jambones, Gilligan, is the bass that little thing can pump out. ‘It’s all about the bass, ‘bout the bass, no treble.’ ”
A few swipes later and Megadeth was screaming through the tiny box.
Nate began to relax. The alcohol combined with the metal and he was feeling back in control. He sat on the couch, fiddled with his phone, played some mindless games from the app store. When boredom reached its inevitable crescendo he switched to Google in order to meander through a universe of needless distraction. He went to the news and noticed a couple advertisements pop over his phone screen, including some for security.
Security. Hmm.
“I know what I’m going to do, little buddy.”
Meow?
Nate tapped through and found himself on the website of a home surveillance company.
“This looks pretty good. Home security starter package.”
Gilligan was shoving his forehead into the back of Nate’s neck. Give me attention.
The House That Jack Built: A Humorous Haunted House Fiasco Page 9
