The Handyman

by Bentley Little

  There was a pause in the conversation. Julie was obviously waiting for me to respond to something she’d said, and I had to come clean. “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear that.”

  “I said, what should we do?”

  Objectively, she and her husband probably should take Frank to small claims court—and it would serve him right if they did—but I was afraid of letting him get any more involved in their lives. I knew what Frank was capable of, and without letting on about how much I knew, I told her that lawsuits against itinerant handymen never worked out; even if a judgment went against them, they just pulled up stakes and disappeared without paying restitution. “It’s more trouble than it’s worth,” I assured her. “The best idea is to chalk this up as a learning experience and hire a competent professional to do the job, preferably someone licensed and bonded.”

  “Oh.” I could hear the disappointment in her voice, and I knew she wanted another answer from me, but my goal was to get her as far away from Frank’s clutches as I could.

  “Here, I’ll let you talk to Teri,” I said, and handed off the phone.

  Teri walked back into the kitchen, the sisters talking for another ten minutes or so while I tried to return to my work. My head was spinning, and though I attempted to write a description for a new listing, the words wouldn’t come. I kept thinking about Frank, wondering if he’d stolen anything from Teri’s sister. A shadow fell over my desk. “So…” Teri said.

  “So?”

  “Let it go? That was your advice? She was hoping for something more professional, more specific—”

  “It was Frank,” I told her. “Frank put in her toilet.”

  Teri’s face grew pale.

  I nodded, standing. “I don’t know how, don’t know why, but it’s him, and my thought was to get her as far away from him as fast as possible.”

  “He’s coming after you,” Teri said, cutting straight to the chase.

  I shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “Jesus…”

  “There’s no reason to panic.”

  “You need to call the police.”

  I’d been thinking the same thing, and I nodded slowly. She was right. Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t Hardy Boys my way out of this one. And I didn’t want to. I wanted to turn this over to the authorities and have the law toss Frank in jail and throw away the key. I wanted him out of my life, and I wanted him punished.

  For Billy.

  I looked up the number of the Ramona Police Department and called to tell them about a handyman preying on local homeowners, including, I said, my future sister-in-law. Teri gave me a silent kiss on the cheek for that one.

  The sergeant I spoke to didn’t seem all that interested in what I had to say, but I couldn’t blame him. Even after framing Frank as a scam artist who was wanted for questioning in a thirty-year-old murder investigation, my actual facts were pretty light. And a leaky toilet wasn’t that big a deal—even in Ramona. I gave the man Julie’s name and number since she was the victim within his jurisdiction, and I told him to call the Randall Sheriff’s Office for more information about Frank. I also let him know that he could call me anytime, though that hardly seemed likely.

  I wasn’t sure how much good it did to complain, but I felt better for having told someone, and I figured, at the very least, it might put some pressure on Frank if he knew the law was sniffing around. Hopefully, he would panic, leave and let Julie alone.

  I was able to get back to work and finished rewriting my property descriptions so that they sounded enticing. Casting a wider net, I sent follow-up emails to the handful of Orange County residents who’d filled out our mass-mailed postcards and indicated that they might be interested in selling their homes.

  Finally, I took a break. Teri was cooking something in the kitchen, and the smell of it reminded me of my childhood. It was some sort of soup that was simmering on the stove, and though I hadn’t thought of it in years, I remembered that my mom often made soups and stews and chilies when I was little, letting them cook all day in a big black pot until the entire house smelled of herbs and vegetables, broth and meat. Billy and I used to love to hang around the kitchen when Mom was cooking, particularly if it was a rainy day and the windows were all fogged up from the heat of the stove and oven, because she used to give us tiny little bowls of whatever she was making so we could taste it ahead of time and let her know how it was.

  I felt sad all of a sudden, but I was happy to be sad, grateful to Teri for stirring up memories that I hadn’t remembered I possessed.

  After dinner, I got in touch with Mark. Like veterans who had been through a war together, we were products of a horrific shared experience, and it somehow made me feel better to confide in him. I didn’t call him on the phone because I didn’t want to frighten him and make him think it was some sort of emergency, but I did email him, and again Mark IM’d me immediately, as though he’d been waiting for my message. I explained the situation, and he offered to back me up with the Ramona police, if need be. I told him that wouldn’t be necessary, and promised to keep him up to date before signing off.

  That night, I had a nightmare. Not about Frank, not about Irene, but about my mom. I was sitting in the pancake restaurant across from the cemetery, eating alone next to one of the front windows, and when I looked up from my breakfast, I could see her walking toward me across the street. The clothes in which she’d been buried had rotted away, gaping holes revealing peeling gray flesh underneath. Most of her hair had fallen out, but the sections that hadn’t were white and freakishly long. Her blanched face wore an expression of fierce malevolence.

  Her pupil-less eyes were trained directly on me.

  I quickly got up from the table, the plate of half-finished pancakes falling into my lap. Ignoring the mess, I looked frantically for another way out of the restaurant even as I kept glancing back to the window and seeing my dead mom grow ever closer.

  I knew she wanted to kill me.

  Pushing my way past a waitress, I ran through a pair of swinging doors into the kitchen. The cooks ignored me as I hurried behind them to the back door, pushing it open and dashing out of the restaurant into the parking lot—

  Where my dad’s rotting corpse was waiting for me, arms outstretched.

  I woke up sweating. I didn’t know what the dream meant, but I didn’t want to know. Teri was sound asleep next to me, snoring. Afraid to go back to sleep, afraid of having another nightmare, I stayed awake the rest of the night, staring up at the ceiling and trying not to think.

  ****

  On Wednesday, I was supposed to meet Evan and Owen for lunch. In preparation, I had written out a timeline, the closest thing to a history of Frank that I could piece together. I’d compiled all of his known aliases, all of his known addresses, the names of everyone I could think of who’d had any contact with the man, and I’d listed everything I knew chronologically, hoping the writers could use their Ghost Pursuers contacts to dig up additional information and figure out what the hell was going on.

  Knowing I’d be gone for the afternoon, I went into the office early, hoping to pick up some new listings. Sales had fallen off in the past few weeks, part of the normal cycle of the business, and I wanted to do everything I could to stave off a longer slowdown. May arrived late, after both Mike and Jim had already come in and then driven out with clients to look at properties. That was unusual for her. She was far more subdued than usual, and when I asked if everything was all right, she seemed vague, distracted and didn’t really give me an answer.

  “What’s wrong?” I pressed.

  “Nothing,” she said curtly. “I’m fine.”

  It was clear that she didn’t want to talk. We all knew what May was like when she got in one of these moods, and I gave her a wide berth the rest of the morning.

  My meeting was for noon, so just to be on the safe side, I left for Whittier shortly after eleven. I w
as ten minutes early, but Evan and Owen were even earlier. I saw them as I pulled up, sitting on a bench in front of the building, texting on their phones.

  “Hey, guys.” I said.

  “Long time,” Evan said, fist-bumping me.

  Owen held up his hand in a gesture of greeting.

  The restaurant was a windowless hole-in-the-wall with red naugahyde booths, dark paneling and velvet matador paintings. Located on an uncrowded side street between a closed hair salon and a plumbing supply store, it was completely nondescript, and I wondered how the writers had discovered the place. As it turned out, Evan had grown up in Whittier and, as a kid, his family had eaten here often.

  The place was surprisingly crowded, and we had to wait several minutes for a table.

  “The food here’s great,” Evan said. “Old school but great.”

  After we were seated, I slid my printout across the Formica table, thinking I should have brought a copy for each of them. “I wrote down what I know,” I said, “to give you a place to start.”

  Over enchiladas, I came clean about all of it: Frank, Irene, the crying baby. These guys were used to hearing confessions from housewives who thought their laundry rooms were haunted, so there was no reason to hold anything back. Even if they didn’t believe something, they could still investigate it.

  “This sounds awesome!” Evan said when I was done.

  “We could build a whole show just around the search for Frank. Call it …The Search for Frank.”

  Evan nodded. “Hell, yeah! I’d watch it.”

  “Movie adaptation would be even better.”

  They were getting off on their Hollywood tangent. I tried to rein them back in. “Listen, guys, feel free to take anything you want from this for a show or a movie or whatever. But before you do that, I need you to find out as much as you can about what’s going on. This is my life here. And it’s affecting other people besides me. We’re not dealing with some scratching sounds in an attic. People have died.”

  Owen nodded soberly. “Got it.”

  An attractive young woman in tight jeans passed by our table.

  “I’d like to sniff her panties on a hot summer day,” Evan whispered.

  He and Owen laughed conspiratorially.

  Focus! I wanted to tell them. They were acting like giggling high school students, and it made me wonder if they would have the discipline to see this through.

  They did ask appropriate questions, though, and Owen actually took notes on a tablet, so I still hoped that something would come of this.

  ****

  “So,” Teri asked when she got home that night, “how did it go?”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “They’re…immature. But they definitely have contacts, and they know this ghost hunting stuff.” I shook my head. “Jesus Christ. Ghost hunting. If you had told me a year ago that I’d be involved with anything like that, I’d’ve said you were nuts.”

  “What if I’d told you a year ago that we’d be living together?”

  I smiled. “I’d’ve said you were nuts.”

  “Things change.”

  “That they do,” I agreed.

  It made me wonder what would be happening a year from now. Me and Teri? I could still see us together. Maybe making plans for marriage. Or even a family. But Frank? And all the…stuff surrounding him? I had no idea where that would lead.

  And that’s what scared me.

  THIRTEEN

  They were waiting in the office when I arrived after lunch the following Monday, seated in the two chairs opposite my desk as though they were ordinary homebuyers looking for a property.

  George and Betsy.

  My heart leaped in my chest the second I walked through the door. I recognized the couple immediately, and the sight of them scared the hell out of me. If May, Jim and Mike hadn’t been at their desks, I would’ve turned around and walked—no, run—out of there instantly. Like Frank, George and Betsy had not aged. They had already been old in the 1980s, when I first saw them back in Randall, and they still looked just as they had when I was a kid, even down to the type of clothes they wore: old-fashioned, old people’s clothes that even today’s elderly didn’t wear anymore.

  I stood rooted in place, wondering what to do. Should I try to hold them here and call the police? The law in Randall had been looking for them, but that was decades ago, and the officers involved were probably not even on the force anymore. Would whoever was there now want to speak with them?

  I wasn’t sure how that worked, but judging by my recent experiences with law enforcement, I figured George and Betsy had probably fallen through the cracks so successfully that they were no longer wanted or known by anyone.

  I decided to play this by ear. Affecting a nonchalance that couldn’t have been further from the way I actually felt, I strode across the office to my desk. May was on the phone, both Jim and Mike were on their computers, and as far as any of them were concerned, there was nothing out of the ordinary here. Walking around my desk and sitting down in my chair, I faced George and Betsy, opting at the last second to pretend I didn’t recognize them. “What can I do for you?” I asked.

  Betsy smiled in a way that let me know she saw through my attempted ruse. “We’re here about Frank,” she said.

  Hearing her speak his name sent a shiver down my spine.

  “You’re George and…Betty?” I said, still pretending I wasn’t sure who they were.

  “Betsy,” she corrected me, wearing that same knowing smile.

  I dropped all pretense. “How is Frank?” I asked.

  There was no response.

  “I’ve been investigating him, you know. That man has done a lot of damage to a lot of people.” I looked at them, struck once again by how neither of them had changed over the years. There was something unsettling about that, something wrong. “You lied to us back then,” I said. “I’ve learned that much. You said you’d both grown up with Frank in Randall, but he was working on homes in Texas and Nevada and New Mexico when he was supposed to be there with you in Arizona.”

  It was George who spoke this time. “You’re right. Frank wasn’t from Randall. Neither were we. But we did grow up together.”

  I looked at Betsy. “Were you really Irene’s sister?”

  “No.”

  “Where did you grow up together?”

  “That’s not important—” George began.

  “It is to me,” I said.

  We looked at each other across the desk.

  George sighed. “Plutarch, Texas.”

  “And everything else you told us?”

  “I don’t remember what all we said.”

  “For one thing, you said that Vietnam made Frank into what he is.”

  They looked at each other. “Frank did change after Vietnam,” George said. “We didn’t lie about that.” There was a pause. “But the truth is that there was always something wrong with Frank. He was always…off. Even as a little boy. I remember once, we were about eight or nine—”

  “And what year was that?”

  He ignored me. “—Frank had what he called his ‘killing box.’ A lot of us had killing jars back then. For insects. We’d put some alcohol or something onto some cotton and seal it up in a mason jar, then catch bugs in it. The bugs would die and we’d pin them on a board for our collections. But Frank’s box was for animals: mice, squirrels, sometimes even cats. And he didn’t have alcohol in there to put them to sleep. He’d capture them, put them in the box…then beat them to death with a hammer. He’d toss the bodies afterward. It was almost as though he killed them just to decorate his box. Because the box was what really mattered to him. It was heavy and made of wood, and inside it was brown with dried blood and red with wet blood, and he would open it up and show it off, and expect everyone else
to admire it as much as he did.”

  “He was a bad kid,” Betsy said, and something in her voice told me that she knew stories about Frank far worse than the one about his “killing box.”

  “So what happened in Vietnam?” I asked.

  “We weren’t there,” Betsy said quickly, before George could respond.

  “But how was he different?” I pressed. “I remember you saying he was more secretive when he came back.”

  “You remember a lot for a little kid,” George said.

  I didn’t respond.

  He sighed. “Yeah, he was more secretive. And it seemed like he had more to be secretive about, like he learned things over there.”

  Things man wasn’t meant to know.

  My mind filled in the cliché, and it seemed completely appropriate. I tried for the next several minutes to get one of them to expand on what they thought Frank might have learned in Vietnam, addressing most of my questions to George since he seemed more likely to answer, but neither would open up to me.

  I changed tack. “What happened to Irene?” I asked.

  They looked at each other.

  I frowned, picking up on an unstated subtext. “What?”

  “She died,” Betsy said simply.

  “I figured. But how? And when?”

  “She died.” Betsy fixed me with a flat stare, and I understood that nothing more would be forthcoming. A shiver tickled my spine.

  “I thought I saw her…” I began.

  “Why are you investigating Frank?” Betsy interrupted.

  I ignored her. “I saw Irene. In Texas. Recently.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “I did. In a house that Frank built.”

  That look passed between them again.

  “I went into Frank’s actual house,” I said. “In Nevada.”

  “Oh, that’s not his house,” George assured me.

  “What do you mean, ‘That’s not his house?’ I saw him. I talked to him.”

  “Well, he did build it, so I suppose it is his house, but it’s not his real house; it’s not where he lives.”