Winter Wake

by Rick Hautala

  Unable to get a seat on the couch, Julia leaned against the wall by the sliding glass door that led out onto a balcony. Whenever the conversation stopped holding her interest, she would turn and look out at the brightly lit city. A myriad of building lights and blinking holiday lights reflected in the glass. Everything outside was crisp and clear compared to the smoky blue haze inside the Atkins’s apartment. Twisting the lock, Julia slid the door open a crack and took a deep breath of frigid air. She tried to ignore the dull ache deep in her belly, but she was still terrified of losing the baby.

  “Ahh, there he is,” one of the men on the couch said. “You can ask him yourself.”

  Turning around, Julia saw John making his way over to her, carefully sidestepping the intervening people until he got to her. He handed her both glasses before sliding down onto the floor next to her. His drink was already half gone, she noticed. Julia sat down on the floor next to him.

  “Ask me what?” John said, looking up at the two young couples on the couch. He recognized the man who had spoken from around the office, but he couldn’t quite place his name. He worked downstairs in the blueprint department.

  “I heard the state police have been investigating the Surfside project site,” the other man on the couch said, looking down at the floor for a moment.

  “Really?” John said. “News to me. What for?”

  His first thought was that the man who had been punched by a truck driver while protesting at the construction site was suing the condo corporation.

  “You know,” the young man said. “Because of them bones they found —”

  “Hah!”

  The sudden burst of laughter made them all look at Barry Cummings, who had turned his attention to their conversation.

  “‘Dem bones … ‘dem bones gonna rise!” he said, adopting a faux-Southern accent and raising his hands menacingly. His face wrinkled with mirth as he looked from one person to the next, finally looking at John.

  “Last I knew,” John said, “they decided they were cow bones.”

  Apparently only Julia noticed the tightness in his voice, but she hadn’t missed how, as soon as the man had mentioned the bones, John’s face paled, and he put his drink down on the floor and clasped his hands between his knees. He shivered and, turning around, pushed the sliding glass down shut.

  “You shoulda seen it,” Barry said, wobbling drunkenly on his feet. “I was there when it happened, ‘n’ nobody knew what the hell was goin’ on. Those friggin’ staties were as lost as everyone else … everybody thinkin’ they was human bones. Huh!” He snorted. “As if that’s the first time someone with a backhoe’s uncovered bones, fer Christ’s sake!”

  Turning to John, Barry smiled.

  “Christ! John, you was there, ‘n’ you was as freaked out as th’ rest of ‘em.”

  Noticeably pale, John held up his hands helplessly.

  “I was … surprised. That’s all.” He glanced at Julia, wondering how much of this he had told her.

  “Surprised?” Barry said, looming over him. “You looked ‘bout ready to shit yourself. Hell, in all the years I’ve been doin’ work like this, whenever we turned up bones, we just kept right on diggin’.”

  “You wouldn’t report it?” one of the women on the couch asked.”I thought you had to — legally.”

  Barry nodded and turned the motion into an effort to stay standing.

  “Sure as hell. When you’re workin’, the last thing you need is to waste time dickin’ around with shit like that. ‘Sides, nine times out of ten — hell, ninety-nine times out of a hunnert, they’re nothing but animal bones — deer or cows or dogs or whatever.”

  “But what about that one time in a hundred when they are human bone?” the woman asked. “What if you find, say, remains of an Indian campsite or a colonial graveyard — something of archaeological importance? Wouldn’t you have to contact someone to check it out?”

  “And slow down the project?” Barry said. “Fuck, no!”

  “That seems an awful waste,” the woman said, glancing at her date for moral support. “But then, what if the bones belonged to a person who’s been missing? I mean, you must have to contact the police for that.”

  Barry shrugged as he stared pensively at the small amount of booze in the bottom of his glass. He drained it off before answering.

  “‘N’ ‘zactly how are we supposed to tell? I don’t know what other people do, but my experience has been you keep right on workin’. We’re there to get a goddamned job done, not screw around with … with shit like that ... ‘less, I ‘spoze, it’s a briefcase full of money or somethin’. Then I might take an interest.” He snorted with laughter, and snot sprayed from his nose, which people pretended not to see. “Hell, I’m runnin’ dry.”

  As he turned to get a refill, John tried to catch his attention to ask if he’d refill him, too, but Barry didn’t hear him and was soon swallowed by the noisy crowd. Glancing at Julia, John held up his glass and asked, “Ready for another?”

  Biting her lower lip, Julia shook her head. “No. But I’m guessing you are.”

  “You told me to have fun,” he said. He started to stand up, but the effort proved too much, so he sagged back down onto the floor and considered. With a huff, he shook his head. “Just one more.”

  “Make it a weak one, okay?”

  “Sure,” he said as one of his co-workers helped him stand. He weaved from side to side as he pushed toward the bar. He was in a somewhat better mood … as long as he didn’t let himself think about the discussion they had just finished. He was angry at Barry for bringing it up in the first place, but no one seemed to pay him much heed because he was so drunk. The last thing John wanted to think about or talk about was those damned bones.

  Contrary to Julia’s request, he ordered another double. As he was turning to head back to Julia, he spun around a little too fast and bumped into a woman standing behind him. His hand was knocked back, and he spilled his drink all over his chest.

  “How clumsy of me. I’m so sorry,” the woman said. As with nearly everyone else at the party, John didn’t recognize her.

  “My fault entirely,” he stammered as he grabbed a handful of napkins from the table and wiped his jacket front. The whiskey soaked through his shirt, chilling him. “Maybe I’ll get lucky and absorb it through my skin.”

  The woman laughed at his lame joke, and he continued blotting his chest and hands, sheepishly glancing at her from time to time.

  “I gotta watch where I’m going,” he said once the pile of napkins was a soggy mess in his hands.

  “Let me get you another drink,” the woman said. “What are you drinking?”

  “Whiskey — a double,” John said, looking around for someplace to toss the wet napkins. He didn’t see a wastebasket nearby and was about to hand them to the bartender when he noticed a thin, black streak on the back of his hand. Confused for a moment, he looked at both hands, trying to see what might have made the mark. He froze, and his heart gave a cold thump in his chest when he unfolded the ball of napkins.

  “What the —” he muttered.

  He opened the whiskey-soaked napkins carefully so the paper wouldn’t dissolve in his hands. His heart thumped once — hard when he saw something written on the bottom napkin. Two words were printed in bold, dark pencil marks.

  MEET ME…

  John had the sensation of hands closing tightly around his throat as he stared in amazement at those two words. He recognized the printing. It was the same hand that had printed all those other notes he’d found.

  “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, hearing his voice distantly.

  “Excuse me?” the woman said, glancing at him. Her heavily made up face wrinkled with her smile, but in his panic, John saw her cheerful expression as a grimace … a taunting, evil grimace!

  “No — I, uhh ... nothing. Thank you,” John said, shaking his head as he took the drink she offered him. His hand was trembling, and he was positive he would spill this one, too.r />
  “I hope you can get your jacket clean,” the woman said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” John said. His mind was a roaring blank. “It’s nothing,.”

  He couldn’t shake the impression that, as pleasant as this woman was trying to be, she had known about the message written on the napkin …

  MEET ME … !

  Did she give it to me on purpose? John wondered, giving her a sidelong glance. Did she set me up for this?

  What if she was enjoying his panic?

  Beneath the sparkling friendliness in her eyes and her smile, was there a wicked gleam of pleasure at his expense?

  Any second now, he expected her to throw her head back and laugh, long and loud at him.

  Positive either a whimper or a scream would come out if he tried to say anything, John nodded before making his way back to Julia. The whole time, he could feel the woman watching his back as if she was secretly enjoying the panic that note had stirred up inside him.

  “I saw that,” Julia said, smirking as John sat down beside her. “Can’t say that was one of your better moves, can we?”

  “What? She bumped into me.”

  “I hope you didn’t spill anything on her dress. It looks expensive.”

  “Give me a break,” John said as he sipped his drink. It burned the back of his throat, but for the first time tonight, it didn’t help calm him. If anything, it made him more uneasy. He was tensed and ready as though expecting to fight. In his right hand, on the side away from Julia, he still clenched the ball of whiskey-soaked napkins. To his fevered imagination, he could feel those two words — MEET ME! — searing the palm of his hand as if they had been written in fire instead of pencil.

  “I’ll finish this, and we can go,” he said, raising his glass in her direction.

  Julia nodded.

  “Happy New Year!”

  “Same to you.”

  IV

  In spite of what she had told her parents — that she didn’t mind being alone while they went to the party — Bri was nervous all evening. As soon as her folks pulled out of the driveway, and several times during the evening, she went to both doors and double-checked to make sure the locks were secure. Even then, she didn’t like being in the house alone for the first time since her grandfather had died.

  Drawing all the shades in the living room, she settled on the couch and watched TV for most of the evening, but nothing caught her interest. She called Kristin, even though she knew she was in Massachusetts, visiting her grandmother, and ended up sitting on the couch, fighting the tension gathering inside her.

  Her discomfort had a lot to do with her grandfather’s death. Even though she kept reminding herself Frank hadn’t been her real grandfather, in the short time she had known him, she had developed a deep attachment to him. She missed his dry sense of humor, which only she — and sometimes her mother — caught. She missed their evening checkers games, too. And he seemed, in turn, to have opened up to her — certainly as much, if not more, than he had with her mother.

  She couldn’t deny how creepy it was in the house, knowing someone had died there recently. Her overactive imagination magnified every rumble of the furnace, every clank of water pipes, and every creak of the floor. It wouldn’t be difficult to convince herself that the house was haunted when her mind distorted one sound into another. What she noticed most was missing the sounds she expected to hear. Now she understood how someone who had lost a husband or wife or child could still to hear the familiar sounds of that person’s activities. Looking into a dimly lit room or down a dark corridor, it would be easy to think you saw the person standing or sitting there.

  As much as she tried not to think like this, Bri kept thinking how every little thing reminded her of her grandfather. After all, this had been his house for so long. It was only natural that — somehow — it had stored up pieces of his presence. Too many times to count, she would find herself sitting bolt upright on the couch and looking around, trying to determine the source of the creaking or clanking or scraping sounds she heard. She stared down the hallway long and hard, her heart pulsing in her throat as she strained to see Granddad, rolling his wheelchair toward the living room to watch TV with her.

  Throughout the evening, Bri’s imagination kept getting tweaked by the lonesome quiet of the house. Besides remembering her grandfather, she thought about Audrey and some of the other strange things that had happened since they had moved into this house. Before long, she was so scared she cringed into the easy chair in the corner where her back was to the wall and pulled the afghan up under her chin.

  She tried not to think about the time she and her parents had climbed Bald Hill and she had seen Audrey in the woods, signaling for her to follow her under the shadows of the trees … and the thing she had tripped over …

  She tried not to think about the time after the snowstorm, when she had gone for a walk on Indian Point and seen Audrey’s footsteps in the snow … footsteps that circled around with no apparent beginning or end …

  She tried not to think about how, during the first few nights in the house, she had heard organ music —”church wood” — resonating in the wooden frame of the house … or the time she had gone to the window and looked out to see Audrey standing in the street, looking up at her, her face ghostly pale in the moonlight.

  She tried not to think about any of these things … but it did no good.

  They arose in her mind unbidden, and she convinced herself that — somehow — they were all related.

  Audrey … the church wood … the thing in the woods … her grandfather dying had to be connected. She knew they were … She just couldn’t see how.

  Faces and New Year’s Eve party scenes in Times Square flashed by silently on the TV. Bri’s loneliness built up until, before she knew it, she was quietly sobbing and shivering. She cried because she missed her grandfather … because she missed her life back in Vermont … all of her friends there. She cried because she knew, until her parents came home, she didn’t dare move from where she was sitting with her knees tucked up against her chest, her chin wrapped in the afghan..

  And that’s how she stayed until half an hour before midnight.

  When their car pulled up into the driveway, she dashed over to the couch and flopped face down with the afghan over her shoulders. She listened as her parents came into the kitchen. Her stepfather had obviously had too much to drink and joked about how she had fallen before the ball in Time square dropped. Her mother led John upstairs to bed and then came down to rouse her.

  “You gonna go up to bed or sleep here?” she asked.

  “I’m going up,” she mumbled, sitting up and feigning that she was more tired than she actually was.

  All she could think was how happy she was, now that her parents were safely home. After wishing her mom a Happy New Year, she trudged up the stairs to bed, trying to get those foolish thoughts she’d been having out of her head.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Storm Watch

  I

  “You mean I can go?” Bri said, incredulous. “Really?”

  She had the phone pressed to her ear, braced by her shoulder, and was looking at her mother, who was sitting at the kitchen table. Into the phone, she said, “She said I can come! ... I dunno. I’ll see if my father —”

  Julia signaled her to silence with a wagging finger.

  “Wait a sec,” Bri said, frowning as she looked at her mother with raised eyebrows.

  Julia leaned across the table, her eyes shifting toward the doorway. From the living room came the flickering light of the TV and the low, indistinct buzz of voices.

  “I’ll drive you,” Julia whispered. “I don’t want to disturb your father.”

  “Kristin? My mom says she’ll give me a ride over.” Bri’s voice rose with excitement. “Okay — great! Give me ten minutes to pack, and we’ll be there … Okay? … Yup … ‘Bye.”

  Bri let out an excited whoop as she hung up the phone. Spinning on her heel, she almost
ran out of the kitchen but then checked herself. Turning back to her mother, she smiled and said, “Thanks a million, Mom!”

  Julia waved both hands at her and muttered, “No problem.”

  With that, Bri dashed upstairs, taking the steps two at a time.

  As she listened to her daughter’s footsteps on the stairway, Julia cringed and looked back at the living room. The last thing she wanted was for Bri — or anyone — to bother John. He was hung over from the New Year’s Eve party and had been quiet and sullen even after having a shower.

  After a light breakfast, he had complained of still having a headache and, mumbling something about having some of the “hair of the dog that bit me,” sat down in front of the TV with a glass of whiskey in hand. That had been at eleven o’clock in the morning, and he kept it up into the afternoon.

  That worried Julia more than anything else right now. She was relieved that Kristin Alexander had invited Bri for an overnight stay at her house. Her maternal instinct warned her that it might be best if Bri wasn’t around the house … at least until John got out from whatever fog he was in.

  Bri’s not the problem, Julia thought, staring morosely at the living room doorway.

  John’s is ... a serious problem …

  The night before, while they had been getting ready to go to the party, he had seemed edgy —

  No, admit it … to yourself, at least … He’s been acting downright wired!

  She’d had high hopes that he would unwind at the party. He had good reason to be feeling down, especially about his father’s death. She and Bri weren’t over it, either, nor would they be for a long time. But John was internalizing this way too much. He was stewing on it and not talking to her about it to get it out. Sure, he and his father had a lot of unresolved conflicts, and now they would never get them worked out ... and — sure, John regretted things he had said and done — and not said or done — but the one thing he shouldn’t do is bottle it all up. Something was smoldering deep inside him, and like a white-hot coal, it was ready to burst into a blinding flash of heat and flame. She thought he was taking things entirely too far if he thought he could spend the whole weekend sitting in front of the TV and drinking.