The funeral was set for Friday, and all of the important decisions had been made, so it was a surprise when the funeral director called Wednesday night and said an emergency had come up. Steve was the one to answer the phone, because his mom had fallen asleep on the couch shortly after dinner, but the man would not tell him what the problem was and would only speak to his mom.
“Hold on,” Steve said, and hurried back into the family room to wake her up.
She seemed groggy and out of it—as she had been since his father’s death—but she took the call. What she heard on the other end of the line made her wake up immediately. “What?!” she shouted into the phone. “How is that possible?!”
Steve couldn’t hear what the funeral director was saying, but he heard his mom’s responses. “Then who could have?...I don’t believe this!...Well, you better, or you’re going to be facing a lawsuit so fast your head will spin!”
She slammed the phone down.
Steve had a knot in the pit of his stomach. “What happened?” he asked.
His mom burst into tears, grabbing him and hugging him tightly.
“Mom?” he said, worried.
“It’s your father! They can’t find him!”
The funeral home had lost his dad’s body? How could that even happen? Different scenarios ran through his head. Had he accidentally been cremated? Had they accidentally taken him to the wrong funeral and buried him under some other name?
“Don’t worry,” he reassured his mom. “They’ll find him.” He had no facts to back that up with, no reason to even think it was true, but the words seemed to help, and her grip on him lessened, her sobs quieting down.
It had to be an accident, Steve reasoned. Some snafu involving the wrong paperwork or something. No one could have stolen the body.
Stolen the body?
That was ridiculous. How could he even allow his mind to go there? No one would steal his dad’s dead body. It was a mix-up at the mortuary, that was all. It probably happened more often than people knew. Everything was sure to be put right before Friday.
The funeral would be fine.
So why, Steve wondered, did he keep thinking about Mr. Walton?
And why could he so easily imagine the handyman carrying his dad’s body off into the night?
TWO
EUGENE, OREGON 2010
Zoraida knew the apartment was haunted the first time she stepped through the doorway.
Kelsey, on the other hand, was completely clueless, and it was only because their relationship was so young and in such a fragile transitional stage that Zoraida hadn’t put her foot down and insist they find someplace else to live. She’d given up her own rented duplex when Kelsey, on a whim, had suggested the two of them move in together, but Kelsey’s apartment had proved too small, and after a week, they both decided that, since they each had a lot of stuff, they needed a place with more rooms. It was Kelsey’s ex, Shari, who said she knew of a two-bedroom apartment that was near downtown with reasonable rent.
Zoraida wondered now if Shari’s suggestion had been part of an intentional effort to get back at Kelsey.
“This’ll definitely work,” Kelsey had said happily, walking with the landlord through the open rooms.
And against her better instincts, Zoraida had agreed.
She wished she had spoken up at the time. They’d been here a month already, and there was not a single night that she’d been able to sleep more than four hours. Kelsey was oblivious. Invigorated by a new bedroom, she initiated lovemaking almost every night, although Zoraida had grown increasingly inhibited. She couldn’t shake the feeling that they were being watched, and while Kelsey wanted to stretch out in bed and try new things, she just wanted to hurry up and get it over with. Afterward, Kelsey would fall instantly asleep, snoring within minutes, and would remain dead to the world until morning, while Zoraida found it almost impossible to fall asleep. Only after hours of tossing and turning would her exhausted body finally give in and allow her to drift into a light, easily interrupted doze.
Haunted.
She wished she had a reason for her feelings, but she didn’t. She hadn’t seen anything, hadn’t heard anything, had only felt a sort of vague unease. She was certain that the apartment was haunted, but didn’t know how, didn’t know why, and on Thursdays when their schedules diverged, when Kelsey was at work and she was home alone, she would walk from room to room, trying to figure out what was wrong and where it was centered. Sometimes she’d start in their bedroom at the rear of the apartment, but more often than not, she’d start at the front door, trying to recreate her initial impression of the place. She’d walk slowly through the front room, past the couch, past the TV, into the small kitchen with its even smaller breakfast nook, then back out into the front room and into the microscopic hallway, peeking into the bathroom, opening the shower curtain to make sure nothing was behind it, checking out the room that was their shared office. She’d end up in the bedroom, on the bed, looking around, wondering how anything so normal could feel so wrong.
The only time that anything close to concrete occurred was one Saturday, at lunch. They were both home, crammed into their tiny breakfast nook, eating macaroni and cheese.
“Do you think time’s speeding up?” Kelsey asked.
Zoraida was getting used to her girlfriend’s idiosyncrasies. What would have once seemed a bizarre left-field query that had nothing to do with anything she now took in stride as a normal topic of conversation. “Not really. Why?”
“I always heard that things seem to go by more quickly when you got older, that a kid’s summer seemed to last longer than an adult’s. But my whole life’s gone by quickly. I never had a slow period. There were no endless summers for me; they all sped by. I’m wondering if the same thing’s true for you, for everyone our age, if we didn’t have those slow years like other generations because time’s speeding up.”
The phone rang at that moment, and since Zoraida was closer, she reached over and grabbed the handset from the wall. “Hello?”
The voice at the other end of the line sounded as though it was coming from an old Victrola. There was the same foreground crackle and hiss, the same faint tinny timbre to the spoken words. “I’m lost.” It was a woman speaking, sounding plaintive even from so far away. “I’m lost.”
Zoraida hung up quickly.
“Who was it?” Kelsey asked.
Zoraida shivered. “I don’t know.”
Her girlfriend frowned. “What did they say?”
“It was a woman. And she just kept repeating, ‘I’m lost,’ in this creepy, otherworldly kind of voice.”
“Prank call,” Kelsey determined. “Don’t worry about it.”
Zoraida did not think it was a prank…but she wasn’t sure what it was. Kelsey had already forgotten about the call, and she tried to forget about it, too, but she couldn’t. Remembrance of that tinny voice recurred throughout the day, and going to bed that night, she was glad she wasn’t alone, glad Kelsey was here with her.
On the two-month anniversary of their moving in together, they attended a “Diversity Rally” downtown, a protest against news coverage of public policy by both the local and national media which left Asians and Latinos out of nearly every discussion of race. As a Filipino-American, Zoraida was tired of not being part of the cultural conversation, and she thought it was long past time that when matters of race were addressed, when poverty or education reform or crime statistics were discussed, the media did not just poll whites and African-Americans about their opinions. As impossible as it would have been to believe ten years ago, these days her sexuality gave her a better seat at the table than her ethnicity, and one of the purposes of this rally was to draw attention to the entire spectrum of the rainbow that lived in the United States.
After signing petitions and listening to a host of activist speakers on the college camp
us where the rally was to start, the entire group of 500-plus began marching downtown, taking a strategic route that passed by the local ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX affiliates.
“Diversity’s not just black and white!” they chanted. “Diversity’s not just black and white!”
They added to their numbers as they moved through the city, and got a lot of honking support from passing motorists, but there really was no planned ending, and after chanting in front of city hall for the benefit of reporters and cameramen covering the event for the six o’clock newscasts, people just started gradually drifting away.
Zoraida and Kelsey had run into some mutual friends, and after walking back to the campus and their cars, the six of them went out for drinks and dinner.
They didn’t get back until late, and the second they walked through the doorway into the apartment, Zoraida knew something had changed. They hadn’t expected to be gone so long and hadn’t left any lights on. The apartment was dark when they entered, and even after Kelsey had reached around to find the wall switch next to the door. The front room had no ceiling light, so the switch was connected to an outlet and turned on a standing lamp next to the television. They’d recently replaced the lamp’s burned out bulb with one that was more eco-friendly, and though Zoraida had not noticed the difference until now, she saw that the glow given off was weaker and yellower than the bright white of before.
There were far too many shadows in the room.
She glanced over at Kelsey to see if she was noticing anything unusual, and was chilled to see a look of apprehension on her girlfriend’s face.
This was real.
There was another lamp on the end table next to the couch, and Kelsey instinctively hurried over to turn it on. Zoraida went into the kitchen to turn on the lights in there. But that was where they stopped. Neither of them, it seemed, wanted to go into that short hallway or the bathroom or the office or the bedroom.
They looked at each other. Kelsey laughed a little to cut the tension, but it wasn’t a real laugh, and it didn’t work. The feeling—whatever it was—was still here, and Zoraida picked up the remote to turn on the television, needing to hear a little noise in the apartment.
She heard more noise than she wanted.
They both heard it.
Above the irritating Access Hollywood music on the television came a high-pitched whine so loud that it hurt their ears. It was not electronic but did not sound natural either. Zoraida could think of nothing that could possibly make that squeal, and her impulse was to turn around and leave, get out of the apartment as quickly as possible.
Then the sound disappeared, the lights went out, the television switched off, the apartment was thrown into darkness, and suddenly the source of the uneasiness they’d felt when they’d walked through the door, the cause of the haunting that had disturbed Zoraida’s sleep ever since they’d moved in, was right there before them. It wasn’t invisible, wasn’t even some vague amorphous shape. It was an old Asian man, a short dark figure wearing what looked like green pajamas. Glowing, lit from within, he was rocking back and forth on his bare heels, laughing through a mouth crowded with crooked overlapping teeth. His laughter was silent, no sound emerged from that open maw, and his eyes burned with a malevolent ferocity that was the furthest thing possible from mirth.
The juxtaposition of the hatred in those eyes and that wide laughing mouth was not merely unsettling but terrifying.
Screaming, practically knocking each other over in their efforts to escape, like two characters in a primitive slapstick comedy, they ran from the apartment, instinctively trying to get as far away from that—
ghost
—figure as quickly as possible, although Kelsey did take the time to close and lock the door behind them before fleeing to the car.
Rent was paid up through the end of the month, but they moved out the next day. They’d spent the night—in separate bedrooms—in Kelsey’s parents’ house, and in the morning they gathered together what friends and family they could, and with a rented U-Haul returned to the apartment complex. Zoraida’s brother Alex was the first one inside, and they let him scope out the place to make sure it was empty before either of them entered. Assured that the rooms were clear, the rest of them swarmed in and, as quickly as they could, carried away the furniture, boxed up the possessions and cleaned everything out.
Two days later, they were installed in a new apartment—an apartment that actually was new—close to the college.
And that should have been the end of it.
But it wasn’t.
While they did not see the Asian man again, they both experienced…incidents. This place was smaller (smaller than Zoraida’s old duplex, which made her wish she had never moved out). There was only one bedroom, and the apartment was sparsely furnished since half of their belongings were now crowding Kelsey’s parents’ garage. But whatever had been behind the events in their old place seemed to have followed them here. The television now turned off and on at will, as did the light in the kitchen, though both of them pretended not to notice and neither of them mentioned anything about it.
Kelsey did mention the fact that she sometimes heard voices, coming from the closet, what sounded like a man and a woman talking low in order to keep from being overheard. It happened both when she was by herself and when Zoraida was with her, though Zoraida heard nothing and whenever Kelsey pulled open the closet door the voices stopped and there was never anything there.
But it was Zoraida who had it the worst. Waking up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom the week after they’d moved in, she flipped on the light and saw what she thought was a face in the toilet, the reflection of a leering old man looking up at her from the water.
The man grinned at her and winked.
After that, she was afraid to go to the bathroom in the apartment by herself. Kelsey had to check first and then stay in there with her. If Kelsey was gone, she would hold it until she went to work, or, if necessary, use the bathroom at the McDonald’s down the street.
All of this put a strain on the relationship.
Their formerly vigorous lovemaking trailed off to nothing, and even casual displays of affection like kisses goodbye and hugs somehow fell by the wayside without either of them noticing.
Then, one day, Kelsey was gone.
Zoraida awoke in the morning to find that her girlfriend was not there. She thought little of it at first, assuming that Kelsey had merely left early for work and had rudely not informed her. But when she came back to the apartment that night to find Kelsey still gone, when a call to Kelsey’s cell not only rang and rang, but did not go into voicemail, Zoraida knew something was wrong. Her hope was that Kelsey had just needed a little space and was taking a few days off, or even that Kelsey was breaking up with her and leaving.
She was afraid that something bad had happened.
Kelsey’s parents did not know where she was when Zoraida called, were not even aware she was missing, and for Zoraida that was the last straw. She immediately called the police, and two detectives came to the apartment to get her statement. They took a photo of Kelsey, looked around to make sure there were no signs of foul play, then left her with a case number and told her they would be in touch.
They were in touch the next day, when the same two policemen arrived not to follow up on her report, but to drag her down to the station for questioning.
“I don’t understand how you can bring me in,” she said in the car. “I haven’t done anything.”
That was when one of the detectives let slip that she was being questioned at the behest of Kelsey’s mom and dad, who apparently blamed her for their daughter’s disappearance. The police had been filled with homophobic falsehoods from the family, and Zoraida realized that the tolerance she’d experienced from Kelsey’s parents up to this point was only the thinnest of veneers. She’d seen enough movies and TV shows t
o know that she shouldn’t answer any questions without the presence of a lawyer, but she didn’t have a lawyer, didn’t even know how to go about finding one, and all the way to the station she obsessed over whether she would have to sit in a cell and wait until a lawyer showed up.
What she learned at the station, once she was in an interrogation room and cameras were trained on her, was that Kelsey was dead. Her body had been found this morning next to a forest control road by a mountain biker. The cyclist had been speeding down the dirt trail when he’d noticed what looked like a naked woman lying in the adjacent runoff ditch. He’d braked to a halt, circled back, and found the bruised and battered body of what was almost immediately determined by law enforcement, once the bicyclist had called them, to be Kelsey Edwards.
“Hope for the best, expect the worst” was a motto Zoraida had always claimed to live by, but this was the worst, and she found that she hadn’t expected it and definitely wasn’t prepared for it. She sat there, stunned, acutely aware that the detectives were watching her reaction. Instead of being allowed to honestly respond to the news, she was under scrutiny, forced to wonder if she was acting in a sufficiently innocent manner, and she burst into tears, not only at the thought that Kelsey was dead, but also from the stress of being under suspicion of murder.
Murder!
It didn’t even seem possible.
She thought of Kelsey, her brain forcing her to imagine what her girlfriend’s body, her beautiful body, had looked like crumpled up by the side of the road, beaten, bloody and black-and-blue.
Zoraida’s sobs intensified. Who could have hurt her? And why? She’d been stripped. Had she been assaulted as well? Entered against her will by some gross pig?
One of the detectives, the older one, a stern no-nonsense looking guy, told her wearily that this was just pro forma, that she wasn’t really a suspect, that they had to do this, and the sooner she answered their questions, the sooner they could all get out of here. She knew she was innocent, knew none of her responses would implicate her, and she decided to answer honestly. If it looked like they were trying to trick her into saying something incriminating, she’d shut up, but if she could clear up any suspicions they had about her, they would be free to pursue the real murderer.
The Handyman Page 18
