by Ray Garton
“Why did he set up playground equipment in the backyard?”
“I don’t know. Maybe his parents put them up.”
“They’re old, but they’re not that old.”
“Who knows. Why?”
“Just wondering. How do you feel?” Jenna asked.
Martha smiled. “Much better with you here. It’s nice to talk.”
“You seem so calm. My heart is still beating a mile a minute.”
“I’ve kind of gotten used to it. It’s still unnerving, but the shock has worn off. But I’ve been thinking.” Martha leaned back and reached down to the pile of tabloid papers stacked beside her on the cushion. She picked through them until she found the Global Inquisitor and opened it on the table. She turned the paper around so Jenna could read it.
The headline read:
VICTIMS OF DEMONIC FORCE
ENDURED RAPE AND TORTURE!
BLOOD-CURDLING DETAILS OF
HORRIFYING EXORCISM!
Gooseflesh broke out at the back of Jenna’s neck when she heard the laughter from outside again, the sound of boys breaking each other up with fart noises and ass jokes. She wondered again if they were out there watching her.
Martha said, “I heard what you said to that man in the living room, that truck-driving medium. About us not having anyplace to go but here. So I’ve been thinking, maybe we should call someone who can help us. Arthur and Mavis Bingham have made a career out of this sort of thing. They’re experts.”
“How could we possibly afford them?”
“I think they make all their money from their books and lectures.”
“How would we reach them?” Jenna asked.
“They’re on the Internet.”
“I can’t sit here anymore,” Jenna said as she scooted out from behind the table. “Let’s go into the living room and start a fire.”
“Yeah, I get the feeling they’re watching me sometimes, too.” Martha turned off her radio and stood. “Would you like me to make you a cup of tea, honey? It’s herbal, no caffeine.”
“That would be nice, Mom, thanks.” Jenna stood and turned to the laundry room, made sure the basement door was still closed. In the living room, she turned on all the lights. Apparently, Miles had brought in some wood and kindling the day before, no doubt at Martha’s urging. Jenna used it and some newspaper to make a fire.
Martha came in with a cup in each hand, gave one to Jenna, and sat in her usual spot at the end of the couch. Jenna stood with her back to the fire and they spoke quietly, almost whispering.
Jenna said, “I’ve got to get some drapes in the windows.”
“That would be good,” Martha said. “But it wouldn’t help, not really. Because it’s not really outside. You can put up all the drapes you want, but we’ve got to do something about what’s in here with us.”
Jenna frowned. “Are we talking about... ghosts?”
“I don’t know what we’re talking about. But I know I can’t sleep in that room anymore. I’ll take the couch.”
“You can have Miles’s room, if you think you can take the stairs. He’d love sleeping down here.”
“I don’t know if I want to sleep in Miles’s room. He’s got a fat man coming up out of the floor every night.”
Now that she had seen the fat man herself, Jenna had some idea of how terrified Miles must have been. She wondered if he was ever in any danger, and the possibility made her feel cold in spite of the fire’s warmth. She shook her head and said, “We kept insisting it was a nightmare.”
“Sometimes we need to listen a little more closely to kids. He knows what’s a nightmare and what’s not.”
“Do you think I should tell Miles that I’ve seen the fat man?” Jenna said.
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
Jenna decided she would deal with that later— whatever she told him, or didn’t tell him, Miles was not going to be the problem. “David isn’t going to buy a word of this,” she said.
“Are you sure? Maybe he’s seen a few things he hasn’t mentioned to you.”
“That’s possible.”
The room became toasty as they sipped their tea in silence. After a while, Jenna put her cup on the lamp table beside David’s recliner and curled up in the big chair. Martha stretched out on the couch. As the fire gently crackled, Jenna and Martha fell asleep in the brightly lighted living room.
Jenna slept fitfully, and finally got up, fixed a pot of coffee, and started breakfast She did not have to go upstairs to wake Miles—he came down dressed and smiling, looking well-rested and better than he’d looked in days. Jenna had not realized, until that moment, how run-down Miles had been looking. Had she been that preoccupied?
Not anymore, she thought. Jenna decided she was going to do exactly what Dwayne Shattuck had told her to do—keep a close eye on Miles.
While Miles and Martha ate breakfast, Jenna called the hospital and spoke with David, who was more alert than he was yesterday, but still groggy from painkillers. He was eager to come home, but had to wait till his doctor came to see him.
Jenna drove Miles down to the end of the driveway, where he caught the school bus, then she returned to the house, showered, and dressed. A couple guys from the garage were good enough to bring David’s pickup truck to the house and park it in the garage while Jenna was getting ready to leave for the hospital. She was on her way out the door when Kimberly called.
“You’re in the newspaper,” Kimberly said.
“Oh, shit,” Jenna said. “I was afraid of that. What does it say?”
Kimberly read the short article to her. It quoted Dwayne’s description of what had happened “in the Starfish Drive home of David and Jenna Kellar.” Jenna reportedly corroborated his story, but was said to have “refused comment.”
“At least they didn’t print my address and phone number,” Jenna said.
“What are you going to tell David?”
Jenna sighed. “I’m going to have to tell him everything. I’m just not sure how to go about it.”
“You could always start by showing him the paper.”
A few minutes later, Jenna drove to the hospital to spend the rest of the morning with David. The morning’s Times-Standard had been left in the room on the bed table, but David had not read it. When Jenna arrived, she took it off the table, put it on the chair, and sat on it. They talked quietly about unimportant things. David sat up in bed and was more animated and alert than he was the day before, but on his face was the same expression he wore when he was experiencing indigestion after a heavy meal—a faint frown, a slight narrowing of his left eye, an uncharming tilt to his mouth. Jenna did not know if it came from pain, or from David’s worries about their future now that he had been injured and would be unable to work indefinitely. It was probably a combination of both.
The doctor came in shortly after noon and talked briefly with David, then said he wanted to see him again in a few days. Shortly after that, David was released and a nurse wheeled him down to the car in a wheelchair. When Jenna left the room, she grabbed the newspaper from the chair and took it home with them.
“I can’t believe you brought people like that into this house,” David said. Wearing his robe, the left sleeve empty, he sat on the edge of the bed, where he had napped for a couple hours after lunch. He tossed the paper aside and it landed on the bed, open to the article about Dwayne Shattuck.
Jenna stood facing him, fingers stuffed into the back pockets of her blue jeans. “I didn’t know what else to do,” she said. “After I saw that little boy—”
“I told you, Jenna. We’re just missing Josh because—”
“I know it’s not Josh. I know it now, anyway. I saw his face. He’s a little red-haired boy with freckles, he looks nothing like Josh. I saw him while Dwayne was trying to contact whatever it is that’s—”
“Jenna, are you hearing yourself?” He spoke through clenched teeth, trying to keep his voice down, and his right fist was clenched in his lap. He looked away from her a
moment, relaxed a little. He slapped his hand down on the newspaper. “Don’t you see, Jenna, you gave that guy exactly what he wanted. He’s in the paper now. This article’s nothing more than a commercial for that guy.”
“He’s retired.”
“Yeah, sure. Not so retired that he couldn’t whip up a little publicity.”
“David, I saw the man. His nose was broken and he was covered with blood.”
“Did you see it happen?”
“No. He fell down behind the recliner.”
“How do you know he didn’t do it himself?”
“For a little article in the lousy Eureka Times-Standard?”
“You can’t buy that kind of publicity. It’s how they work. He may get a magazine article out of this, maybe even a book.” David sighed as he stood and put his right arm around her. He spoke quietly, gently. “Why didn’t you talk to me about this, huh?”
“Whether or not he was a phony has nothing to do with what I saw, David. I haven’t been imagining things. There’s something in this house. Those boys who keep showing up in the backyard in the middle of the night are part of it.” She stepped back, out of his embrace. “You have to admit, David, there’s something very weird about those boys, about the way they come and go.”
He nodded. “Yes, I admit that. And I’ve been having some pretty strange dreams lately. Dreams about those boys ... I think. I’ve even walked in my sleep.”
Jenna frowned. “You’ve been walking in your—”
His anger flared again as he interrupted. “But that does not mean our house is haunted, for crying out loud. I can’t believe you’d spend money on some old gypsy woman when we can barely afford the groceries we need.”
“Kimberly doesn’t expect me to pay her back right away.”
“That’s even worse—borrowing the money. How are we going to pay her back? Especially now that I can’t work? I don’t understand it, Jenna. You’ve never been the kind of person to fall for this sort of thing. What were you thinking?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t know what else to do. There’s something in this house with us, and I was trying to find someone who would know how to deal with it.”
“There’s nothing in this, house but us, dammit!” he shouted. “But now that we’re in the paper, you just wait—every phony-baloney medium and fortune-teller-within a hundred-mile radius is going to be knocking on our door. And when they do, we’re chasing them off. Do you understand, Jenna? No more of this shit. We can’t afford it, and even if we could, it would still be a waste of money, and I won’t have con artists in my house milking my goddamned wallet.”
Jenna decided to say no more. David was furious, and she knew any further discussion would only anger him more. At the same time, she refused to apologize for doing what she still considered the right thing in the face of something she found frightening and confusing.
“Let’s not fight,” she said. “Miles is home from school.”
“We’re not fighting.” He sat down on the edge of the bed, shook his head. “I don’t understand why you didn’t come to me.”
“I tried. That day in the basement. You didn’t want to hear about it, you made that clear. That was when I thought it was Josh. Now I know it’s not. But in a way, that’s worse, because I don’t know what it is.”
David opened his mouth to speak, but she kept talking.
“Whether you believe it or not, there’s something in this house.” She turned and left the room.
David tried to calm himself before going downstairs. He was angry that Jenna had borrowed money from Kimberly Gimble. It was bad enough that Martha had been paying for so much, but to borrow from a virtual stranger was embarrassing, and for something so ridiculous. It was so uncharacteristic of Jenna, he wondered if she was okay. Had the loss of Josh been eating at her in a way he had not noticed?
David thought of the boys he’d seen in the backyard. Had he really seen them the last couple times, or had they been part of his dreams? He thought of the fat, cigar-smoking man in his dreams, and of waking up in the basement, and in Miles’s bedroom in the middle of the night. But he refused to believe there was anything supernatural involved. He blamed it on his worries about finding work, a good job that would allow him to support his family again. As a boy, he had walked in his sleep whenever he had a lot on his mind—an upcoming test at school, an important football game. There was nothing supernatural about it.
It was so unlike Jenna to do what she had done that David wondered if he should be worried instead of angry-
The chirp of the telephone startled him out of his thoughts, and he picked up the receiver. “Hello.”
A second later, he heard Jenna answer downstairs: “Hello.”
After a moment of silence at the other end: “Hello, is this the Kellar residence?”
“Yes,” David said.
“You don’t know me. My name is Lily Rourke. I’m calling from Mt. Shasta.” She sounded uncertain of herself and overly pleasant, as if she were trying too hard. “This is going to sound ... well, it’s hard to know how it’ll sound to you because I don’t know you. I’m a psychic. I’ve helped the police solve a number of crimes, and I—”
“Hang up, Jenna,” David said.
Lily Rourke said, “No, wait, please. I read about you in the paper, and I need to tell you something. It’s very important. If you’d just—”
“You read about us in the paper?” David said.
“I read about what happened in your house. To the medium. The trucker.”
“But that was just in the local paper here in Eureka.”
“It was in the Redding Record Searchlight,” Lily Rourke said. “It seems one of the wire services picked up the story. I got the impression it ran nationwide.”
“Oh, shit,” David said. “Look, whatever you’re selling, we’re not interested.”
“Mr. Kellar, do you have a swing set in your backyard? And a slide?”
“What? Listen to me—do not call back, okay? Jenna? Are you still on the line?”
He heard the sharp click of the downstairs connection being severed.
“Good-bye,” David said before hitting the Off button with his thumb.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Lily. Thursday, 2:19 p.m.
Lily replaced the receiver, not surprised but no less frustrated. She sat at the table in her kitchen. A cup of coffee had gone cold and four slices of Entenmann’s apple crumb cake remained untouched on a paper plate. Lily’s appetite had been fading, and she did not sleep well at night. The visions left her with a nagging sense of urgency that had preoccupied her to the point of distraction.
She had learned from her previous visions that it: was not only the visions themselves that needed her careful scrutiny, but the feelings they left behind, and those they stirred in her waking hours as she thought about them. She had to be open to everything.
She was convinced that the unfamiliar faces she’d seen in her vision were the Kellars—David and Jenna, according to the newspaper article—and that the house she’d seen was theirs. She could not shake the feeling that they were in some kind of peril. But it was the little boy who impressed her as the one in the most danger. From what, she was not sure, but it had something to do with the fat man in the cowboy hat. Even if the Kellars had been willing to listen to her, Lily had no idea what she would have told them.
Claudia had shown her the story in the Record Searchlight that morning. As soon as she read “Starfish Drive,” Lily remembered the throbbing red starfish on the mailbox in her vision, and knew the address would be 2204.
She’d immediately called Directory Assistance and asked for both the telephone number and street address of the Kellars in Eureka on Starfish Drive. Sure enough, the address had matched. It had taken Lily a few hours to muster the courage to make the call. She had a difficult time dealing with people in normal situations—she had not looked forward to explaining to total strangers on the phone that she was a psychic having v
isions about them. A small part of her was relieved that Mr. Kellar had solved that problem for her. But she could not stop there.
Lily stood and dumped her coffee into the sink and poured a fresh cup. Flash, her pudgy manx tabby, shot through the kitchen in a gray blur. He made himself scarce most of the time, appeared only long enough to race through a room to get wherever he was going, and stopped only at mealtime to eat, and bedtime, when he curled up beside Lily on the bed and slept.
Phoning the Kellars was not going to work. Lily saw only one other option remaining, and she did not like it, but knew it was inevitable. She sipped her coffee and carried it with her as she left the kitchen and went out front to the store.
There were a couple of browsers—a young man with long dark hair and thick glasses in the Reincarnation section, and a bullet-shaped, middle-aged woman perusing the selection of tarot cards. Claudia was at the front counter, putting a new roll of paper in the register.
Lily joined her behind the counter and leaned close as she spoke in a whisper. “Could you get away for a couple days? Maybe a few?”
“Is this a trick question?”
“I need to go to Eureka, but I can’t go alone. So how would you like to get away for a while? I’ll pay your regular wages while we’re gone, because you’ll be doing all the driving, so it’ll be like you’re working.
“I think I could fit it into my busy social schedule,” Claudia said. “What about the store?”
Lily chewed her lower lip a moment as she looked around at all the shelves of books and thought.
Claudia said, “What about Mark Sieber?”
Mark was a local artist who had filled in for Claudia at the store a couple times in the past. Lily remembered him as quiet but efficient, and always pleasant with the customers. She said, “I’ll call and see if he’s available. If necessary, I’ll just close up.”
“Did you call the number?”
Lily nodded and told her how the call had gone.
“What makes you think approaching them in person is going to make any difference?” Claudia said.
