by Kait Nolan
“Miss Evie,” he said, and Evie was struck for the first time by just how young he looked. She hadn’t noticed it before, but he looked as if he could be a college student, just out of high school. “I believe you when you say that things have been moved in the house.” Evie felt her shoulders begin to relax. “I went through something similar when I came back from Iraq. The mind can play tricks on you. You lost your husband not too long ago, right?”
Evie nodded.
“Sometimes that kind of…” He paused, looking for the right word. “Stress can make your mind act up. It messes things up in time, you know? What I’m saying is, maybe you don’t need to be alone. Do you have family or friends, anyone you can stay with? A big house like this, I just don’t want to think about you staying here scared.”
Evie thanked him, promising she would call her family if she got too scared. Then she watched the police car drive away and went back inside her house.
~*~
That night, Evie wasn’t scared. But the house seemed emptier, more cavernous, and sleep was never an escape for her. With sleep came dreams, and Evie found that she couldn’t trust her own mind to provide any kind of safe solace. She had tried to distract herself at night in the same way that she had during the day. Rooms, after all, could be painted at night just as well as they could at any other time, but Evie found that physical labor just made her mind race even more, worrying about if she should have chosen a flat finish instead of the eggshell or if the new fans she picked to go in the guest bedroom matched the Greek Revival style of the home.
Most nights, she tried to sleep, but when that failed, she usually ended up in front of the robotic blue glow of the television screen, wrapped in her favorite afghan, made by her grandmother, watching whatever infomercials or Lifetime movie she could find. She used to love horror movies, but her therapist had warned against those, so usually she opted for friendlier fare. Sometimes sleep surprised her, but most nights, she just lay on the couch in a hibernating state, somewhere between sleep and wakefulness.
Tonight, after an hour or so of staring at the ceiling, she had ended up once again wrapped up on the couch, watching a movie on LMN called The Debutante Dominatrix.
Dear Lord, she thought, they are running out of ideas.
At one of the commercial breaks, Evie got up to get herself a snack—peanut M&M’s, her weakness—and a Coke. Popping the colored candy into her mouth, she laughed at how perfectly tailored the commercials were for the audience. First, she saw a diaper ad, followed by a new floor cleaner that promised cleaner floors in half the time, clearly hitting up Suzy Homemaker. She half-expected the next commercial to be for a divorce lawyer, or maybe an advertisement for a new depression medication.
“Dang it,” she said aloud, popping a few more pieces of candy in her mouth, while watching a pop singer flaunt her slim, post-baby body. “Weight Watchers. I should have seen that one coming.”
The LMN logo appeared on the screen again, followed by a voice announcing that the movie was being brought to you by the following sponsor.
The words Virtual Match flashed across the screen.
“Need someone special in your life?” a sexy woman’s voice purred. “Want the benefits of a relationship without one? Try Virtual Match. Get the connection without the commitment.”
A dating website. Figures.
The movie started again, and Evie settled back to see what the debutante dominatrix would get into now. It seemed that her newest client was her best friend’s husband. This was getting good.
Evie watched, crunching on her candy, but her mind kept going back to the idea of a dating website. It wouldn’t be so terrible, would it? Try to meet someone. Or at least tell her sister that she was trying to meet someone. Maybe she could make a profile and at least buy herself some time. It couldn’t hurt. She wouldn’t have to actually talk to anyone, not if she didn’t want to.
She grabbed her laptop, which was charging on the end table, and typed in the website she’d seen on the commercial.
Virtual Match, the entry screen read.
“Well, hello,” she muttered under her breath, upon seeing the big, happy greeting on the webpage.
Evie clicked the button that said “Sign up for a free trial.”
As prompted, she entered her information. Then she was prompted for a username. Evie bit her lip. She needed to be on her game here. Witty, definitely. Charming, yes. Nothing that might give away her real name or place, just in case she met up with some weirdos.
The first thing she thought of was “Looking4Love,” which unsurprisingly was already taken by some other user. She didn’t want it anyway. On second look it seemed to scream desperation.
Maybe she should play up her physical appearance, thinking of how her husband had loved her copper red hair. When they had met, it had been cropped short, an angled bob cut nearly to her chin, and he had told her that, coupled with her freckles and gray blue eyes, had made quite an impression on him. She had let it grow just past her shoulders now, making the color even more striking. Fingers poised over the keyboard, she started to type something along the lines of “LucyBall” or “ILoveRedheads” but thought that sounded silly.
Tired of the entire process already, she choose the moniker “FixerUpper,” thinking that it didn’t matter anyway, since she was only doing this to appease her mother and her sister. After all, she didn’t have to even talk—or look at or meet—any of these potential Mr. Rights. On the screen, a last message warned that the first month was free, after which her debit or credit card would be charged $24.95 each month, which seemed to Evie to be exorbitant, but then again, she didn’t frequent dating sites often, or really at all.
She rubbed at her eyes, which were itching for a sleep that she doubted would come.
The next screen that popped up shook her awake.
“Tell us about your ideal mate,” a calming voice said aloud from her laptop’s tiny speakers. Two large icons showed up on the screen: one blue with the male symbol, and the other pink, with the female counterpart.
She clicked the blue one. Often she had wished she had more Sapphic proclivities, but when she really got down to imagining the intimacies of that, well...she was straight. “The straightest girl in straight town,” a friend of hers in college, who was proudly bisexual, used to tease. “But it’s okay. We still love you.”
The next screen was a list of questions, presumably things she could put in her profile, but then a voice, the same dreamy-voiced female from earlier, said, “Who is your dream man?”
Evie blinked the last of the sleepiness from her eyes and peered into the laptop’s screen.
She saw a blank space open for a name, an age, an occupation, even a “How You Met” section. At the bottom of the screen was a link that said, “Try one of our dream guys.”
Confused and curious, Evie clicked the link, which brought up a list of men, with profile pictures that looked like they’d be more at home on the IMDB page of Magic Mike than on e-Harmony. She scrolled down the page, as picture after picture of chiseled jaws and muscled bodies appeared on her screen. She clicked through a few. “Robert Jackson,” one read. Dark skinned with pearly white teeth, he wasn’t bad looking at all. And his glasses gave him a kind of hot-for-teacher, professorial appeal. Apparently, Evie met him at a dog park. Fat chance. No one would believe I would keep an animal in my house.
The next one introduced her to a blonde surfer-looking man. “Well, hello, Jamie Ballard, age 24,” she said. They met when they ordered the wrong drink at Starbucks. Evie wrinkled her nose. The closest Starbucks was all the way in Gulfport, nearly half an hour away, making the whole story seem unlikely. What was this site? she wondered. Gotta be an escort service.
She went over to the “About Us” tab, which told her that she was wrong on both the dating and the escort fronts. Apparently, users paid money to have strangers text and phone them, pretending to be significant others. A surprised whistle escaped Evie’s lips. Who was the pr
ecise audience for something like this? Could that many people in the world really need to fake relationships? She thought of her morning talk with her sister. Of the baby shower that was being thrown in her sister’s honor. “For Couples,” the swirly script on the pink card stock had said, just under the picture of the stylized stork. She thought of the dinner she would have to sit through at her mother’s house, which would no doubt be filled with pitiful glances over the basket of buttermilk biscuits.
Of course, she thought. Everyone needs this website. Every single person who is north of twenty-two and has a Southern mama is most definitely in need of this service.
She clicked the back arrow and looked over the list of men, this time settling on a dark-haired man with kind eyes, whose chiseled chin and cheekbones reminded her a little of Jake Ryan from Sixteen Candles.
His name was Luc Savini, short for Lucas, she guessed. Then she laughed, realizing that it could be Lucas if she wanted it to be Lucas. Hell, his name could be John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt, for all she cared. He wasn’t real, and that was brilliant.
Her mother and her sister could sit back happily, knowing that their dear, sweet Evelyn was spoken for, and Evie could focus on renovating this house. From any way she looked at it, she was a winner.
“Luc” was apparently thirty-two—good age—and loved books and travel—both good—and sports and video games—not Evie’s first choice for hobbies, but she needed this to be believable. They met at a party. “Our eyes met,” Luc wrote in the profile, “and we couldn’t take our eyes off each other.”
Evie shrugged. The details of the story seemed vague enough that she could make it work. She quickly read over the rest of Luc’s biography. He was from New Orleans, which was only an hour away, and Evie had quite a few friends in the city, so it was plausible that she could have crossed paths with Luc at some point. New Orleans was also still far enough away that her family wouldn’t expect to meet him right away, especially if she made up some kind of job for him that kept him busy. Or maybe he traveled a lot for work. That would be best.
A small smile tilted the corner of Evie’s mouth. A fake boyfriend could just be the answer to all of her problems.
Evie and Luc. Sounded pretty great to her ears. Pretty damn great.
Still smiling, Evie clicked the laptop closed and went upstairs, where she fell asleep easily in her bed for the first time in weeks.
Chapter Two
Evie must have slept later than she thought, because when she made her way downstairs for coffee, she saw that the broad sunlight of day had already replaced the misty filtered light of early morning.
The mail, usually shoved through the mail slot at the front door around nine, was already in a pile at the foot of the door. She picked it up, fanning through the letters as she walked into the kitchen. It was a fairly heavy bounty with the usual suspects—her electric bill (right on time), a few advertisements for local businesses, some white-toothed man running for some sort of judge, a plea for money from a national charity (from the heft of the envelope, it most likely contained return address stickers that she would guiltily use even though she never actually sent in the requested donation)—and a few surprises. One was a postcard containing a picture of her friend Jenny in a lovely wedding dress with her new groom, Cory. The happy couple was standing in front of a brick wall, leaning toward each other for a cute, if not chaste, kiss. Between them stood a chalkboard, with the words “Thank You” written in swirly calligraphy.
Evie turned the card over to see a short handwritten note, thanking her profusely for the pizza stone she had bought them. She smiled and started to throw it away in the trash and then tossed it to the table, deciding she would tack it up to the fridge later. She looked down at the last letter. It was unassuming, a standard white office envelope. No return address and an American flag Forever stamp in the top right corner. Her name was typed in the center, the font and heaviness of the ink suggestive of a typewriter rather than a computer.
Her blood froze within her veins.
She tore open the letter, knowing what it was and yet hoping with all her soul that she was wrong.
The letter was nearly an exact twin of the first one she had received, but she knew from the greeting line that this letter was different.
While the first letter had simply said “Hello” to no one in particular, this one said, “Hi, Evelyn.”
She swallowed the lump forming in her throat and continued reading.
“I bet you’re surprised by that. Yes, I know your name now. I know a hell of a lot more than that, too.”
Her legs weakened against the fear that was shuddering through her body and she sat down, still reading.
“I’m sure you are curious, DYING to know what I know. Why I know it. How I’m going to use it.” She stared at the letter, the way that dying was typed in all capital letters and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the letter was still there in her hands, the words still taunting her.
“Have you looked up your house’s history?” the letter continued. “Are you questioning every shadow you see in the corners? Every strange noise you hear at night? Do you wonder if you locked the doors? You should. You should be more careful about the loose locks on the windows, too, especially the one that looks to the west. What are you calling that room? The library? It used to be the parlor. A woman on her own can never be too careful.”
She threw the letter to the floor, fear and anger flooding her. When the first letter arrived, she thought it had to be a joke, someone trying to make her feel uneasy about the house. “The Watcher,” as he signed this letter—at least she assumed it was a he—had to be a friend of hers, just trying to make her nervous in this big house all alone. She, more than anyone, had joked that a house like this one, built in 1848, had to have at least one ghost. Of course, she had always imagined more of a Casper-type friendly ghost. Not this. This was frightening, though she reminded herself that it wasn’t exactly threatening. It could still be a joke. A sick joke, but a joke. Or maybe a neighbor who was truly concerned with her well-being and found an unsettling way of expressing it.
Now that there was more than one letter, she had to assume that someone was actually watching the house—and watching her. Her first thought was to go to the police, but then she remembered how they had practically laughed at her the last time. Evelyn Bowen, the poor widow woman jumping at her shadow. She refused to do that again.
She shivered despite the humid heat and picked up the letter, walking straight to the drawer beneath the coffee maker. She stuffed it inside and slammed it shut. Whoever was sending those, she would deal with it...later.
~*~
Evie’s first task of the day was a trip to the local hardware store, a tiny little brick building right off Main Street in the nearby town of Lost Beach. The facade hadn’t changed since the 1950s, the same faded mural painted on the side of the building, advertising a paint brand she didn’t think was even made anymore. She opened the doors, her arrival announced by the tinkle of tiny silver bells.
“Well, I thought you’d be back,” the middle-aged man behind the counter said.
She held up her hands. “Not for the reason you think.”
“So you didn’t break your neck on the ladder I sold you?”
She laughed. “No, I did not. And the stain is going to look really great on the staircase railing.”
He nodded.
“I just came in to look at some exterior paint.”
He walked out from behind the counter and waved for her to follow.
Following him down the maze of aisles, she found the wall display full of tiny paint chips, a rainbow of every shade of every color imaginable.
“I must say,” he said, scratching the salt-and-pepper scruff on his chin, “that I didn’t think you were quite at the place where you would be picking out finishings.”
She shrugged, and he walked away. Truth was that she wasn’t anywhere close to needing these, but she needed to feel
like she was at least a little bit closer to finishing at least some part of that house.
Her phone buzzed in her back pocket. She pulled it out, thinking it must be her mother, maybe running late for their lunch date.
UNKNOWN NUMBER: Hi, It’s Luc.
Her heart quickened seeing the name. A silly reaction, she knew, since he wasn’t a real person, yet here she was, blushing as if her high school crush had just passed her a note.
Another text rang through, making her jump.
LUC: Bad time?
She fumbled, nearly dropping the phone.
EVIE: No, not at all.
Her thumbs tripped over each other as she typed. She felt silly being so nervous. Still, her heart fluttered wildly beneath her blouse.
EVIE: Hi.
LUC: I had a great time last night.
Right. The welcome e-mail from the company had told her about this. The texts would pick up as if she and “Luc” had just met, which if she remembered right was supposed to be at a party. She could play along with this.
EVIE: Me too.
As she hit send, she closed her eyes, feeling more than a little foolish. When her phone beeped, she opened one eye and looked to see what Mr. Right had written.
LUC: I’m tired after all that talking. I don’t normally meet people I can connect with like that.
A high-pitched sound, nearly a squeal, escaped past her lips, drawing the attention of the shopkeeper who had returned to his business at the front desk. She bit her lips and focused her gaze on her phone. She hadn’t been sure what to expect with something like this. To be honest, she had suspected that she would get a few robotic responses, like a kind of script followed by the customer service employees who called her at dinnertime. But this guy really seemed to be selling it—whatever he was selling. Evie hadn’t figured that out quite yet. Companionship? Fantasy? Was this the gigolo of the technology age?
Or maybe there were an unusually high number of single women with nosy Southern mothers and hugely pregnant sisters who needed a ruse to get them to back off? As she considered this, Evie caught sight of the clock and realized she was dangerously close to being late to lunch with her mother.
