The Writer

by D. W. Ulsterman

  Adele saw the book’s cover and realized it was a copy of Manitoba.

  The taxi driver tapped the book with the tip of his left pointer finger.

  “You read it?”

  Adele nodded.

  “Yeah, I’ve read it.”

  Minutes later Adele was adjusting her backpack and walking down the long driveway to the Speaks family’s residence. A row of aged pine trees bordered either side of the drive, their long branches reaching and creating swathes of shadow that made Adele quicken her pace.

  It was nearly a half mile before she came upon a large, two-story farmhouse that rose up from a large clearing. The tall grass appeared not to have been cut in years. In some spots it was well over three feet. The home itself leaned drunkenly to its right side, and its dull, white exterior was badly chipped and faded. One of the windows was boarded over with a section of water-stained plywood. Large sections of the roof were covered in blue tarp and kept in place by concrete cinder blocks. The rotted steps leading to the covered front porch had several large gaps where it appeared a foot had broken through.

  If Adele didn’t know better, she would have thought the house had been abandoned long ago. Rusted remnants of various vehicles dotted the landscape around the residence. A large, reddish barn missing its roof stood some three hundred yards to the right of the home, its entrance almost fully concealed by the tall grass.

  The area was oddly absent of any noise. Even the wind seemed determined to avoid the place. Adele was shocked that human beings could live in such conditions. She moved carefully up the porch steps and stood just outside the front door. Her right hand trembled as it reached out to grasp the door’s handle.

  Locked. Did you think it would be that easy?

  Adele strode through the tall grass toward the rear of the home. She reached a porch, where a piece of plywood attached to hinges served as a makeshift backdoor. Three old, plastic lawn chairs facing the back portion of the multi-acre property populated the porch. A filth-encrusted coffee can, overflowing with cigarette butts rested between two of the chairs. The stench of the stale tobacco was almost overwhelming, but Adele soon realized the smell was actually coming from inside the home.

  She stepped carefully onto the covered porch and pulled the door open. Adele took a long, slow breath and was about to enter the home when she stopped and turned around.

  Three chairs.

  Adele looked at each of the chairs more closely. Two of the seats had deep indentations.

  Martin and Will Speaks.

  There was barely any indentation on the bottom of the third chair, indicating it was hardly used, or used by someone not heavy enough to make one.

  Adele could feel her heart pounding inside her chest. A layer of sweat covered her face. The pieces of a puzzle she didn’t want to imagine to actually be real were falling into place.

  She knew what must be done.

  The answer, however horrible it might prove to be, was to be found within the home. Adele returned to the backdoor and walked inside.

  As soon as she crossed the door’s barrier, Adele’s right hand reached up to cover her nose and mouth. She fought the urge to vomit as her senses were assaulted by the stench of rotting food, nicotine, and human waste. The floor below her feet was covered in refuse, a combination of garbage, dirt, and cigarette ash. She heard flies buzzing over the dishes and scum-water that filled the sink, but couldn’t actually see them in the kitchen’s grey-gloom light.

  An old, nicotine-yellowed fridge hummed quietly in the right corner of the kitchen. Next to it was a small, plastic-topped eating table covered in stacks of newspapers and food-encrusted forks and knives. Three chairs surrounded the table.

  Yet more dirty dishes were piled atop a black stove stained with the remnants of meals from days, weeks, and months past. Adele’s eyes adjusted to the low light of the kitchen interior as she looked down a narrow hallway that led from the kitchen into the home’s main lower level.

  The short walk down that hallway revealed walls scattered with fist-sized holes along with empty picture frames devoid of images. Adele emerged from the hallway into the living room and found it surprisingly clean and free of clutter. Even the dark brown and orange shag carpet that covered the floor appeared to have been regularly vacuumed. A dark, red-cloth couch ran nearly the entire length of the back wall in front of which was a simple, black-painted coffee table. On the opposite wall from the couch was a decades-old television with a pair of rabbit ears on top of it. The TV didn’t appear to be plugged in. The entire room seemed to be an attempt by the home’s residents to represent a point in time from which they didn’t wish to move beyond, a kind of remembrance of what once was.

  Even the cream-colored walls looked to have been kept almost free from the yellow nicotine stains that covered every other corner of the house.

  Adele turned toward the narrow, wood-framed staircase that led upstairs, but found it in such disrepair she feared it to be incapable of supporting her weight. The third step was missing entirely and opened up into a pitch-black space beneath the stairs out of which Adele thought she smelled something even more wretched than the rotting stench from the kitchen.

  Beyond the staircase was another narrow hall that included three doors. The first door opened into the home’s only bathroom. It was in a similar state as the kitchen with the added attraction of being covered in a thick layer of urine and human waste both on the floor and the walls nearest the toilet. The single sink was badly cracked, and the wood countertop was nearly rotted entirely from years of water seeping through the broken sink. Adele reached down and opened the small cabinet door under the sink and screamed before slamming the door shut. She backed out of the bathroom and then took several seconds to calm herself.

  Underneath the sink was a massive rats’ nest with a mewling mass of newborn rodents that shrieked hungrily at the sound of the cabinet door being opened. Just before slamming the door shut, Adele was certain she saw a dark blur leap into a hole in the wall behind the sink and knew it to have been an especially large, full-grown rat.

  With her legs still weak and shaking from the rat-scare, Adele made her way down the hallway to the first of the two remaining doors and found it already open. Inside was a small bedroom with a badly stained mattress on the floor, accompanied by piles of dirty clothes and empty pop cans. The walls were papered with a pattern of sunflowers and on the wall behind the mattress were the painted words, “Will’s Room.”

  Adele moved quickly to the second room across the hall from the first. The door was closed and would only open after she gave it a hard shove with her left shoulder. The door’s hinges groaned loudly to reveal a space similar in size to the first bedroom, but with more furnishings.

  A double-sized dark oak bed frame was in the far left corner with a window overlooking the backyard area. A single, dark-blue blanket was neatly laid out over the mattress, accompanied by two pillows encased in matching blue coverings. The smell of cigarettes was strongest in this room, and a large ashtray on the nightstand next to the bed overflowed with spent cigarettes and ash.

  On the other side was a small walk-in closet without a door. The space had just a few olive-colored, work shirts hanging from a single bar, along with a neatly pressed San Juan County Sheriff’s uniform, and a pair of brightly polished black dress shoes.

  A large freezer that appeared to be unplugged dominated a third wall. Why Martin Speaks would keep an unused freezer in his bedroom made no sense, but almost nothing in the house made sense.

  Two pairs of shoes sat at the end of the bed. The first was a worn-out pair of black rubber boots. The second was a smaller pair of canvas boating shoes. Adele stared at them for several seconds, trying to remember where she had seen them before.

  Her eyes widened. She quickly removed her backpack, placed it atop the bed, and withdrew the old article on Calista Stone’s death. She found the photograph of Sheriff Martin Speaks with the caption that read:

  Sheriff Spea
ks holding the only thing found following the search for Calista Stone, a shoe that her husband later identified as belonging to his wife.

  Adele looked from the photo to the pair of shoes at the end of the bed.

  It’s the same shoe, except there’s the other one, too. If only the one shoe was found floating in the water, why are both shoes in this house twenty-seven years later?

  Adele reached down and picked up the same left-foot shoe that was being held by Martin Speaks in the newspaper article so that she could confirm it was the same one. In the photograph, a portion of the rubber toe appeared to have a darkened gouge in it. Adele stared at the shoe in her own hands and located the exact same mark on the toe, confirming it was the same shoe.

  From somewhere outside, the far-off sound of a motor caused Adele to panic and drop the shoe onto the wood floor, where it hit with a thump. She ran down the hall into the living room to look through a window fully expecting to see Martin and Will Speaks returning in their pick-up truck. Instead, she realized the noise was the sound of a small, single-engine plane flying overhead, likely on its way to the Friday Harbor Airport.

  It was then Adele realized she had left her backpack in the bedroom. She re-entered the room and proceeded to return the shoe to its place at the end of the bed and then swung the backpack over her shoulders.

  I need to take pictures before I leave.

  Adele took out her phone and began photographing the home’s interior. She took shots of both bedrooms, the living room, and the kitchen. She avoided the bathroom, still too frightened by the things living under the sink. When she exited to the backyard, she sent Delroy a text.

  Almost finished here. All clear?

  After nearly a minute of waiting, she finally received a reply.

  They are still at the boat but could be leaving soon. Good if you get out of there. Find anything?

  Adele made certain the backdoor was fully closed.

  Maybe. Will talk soon. On my way.

  Adele was soon ducking under the locked gate and crossing the road toward Joe’s awaiting taxi.

  “How’d it go?”

  Adele gave a shrug while scanning through the pictures she had taken.

  “It went fine. Take me back to Deer Harbor, please.”

  They were nearly halfway to the marina when Adele suddenly cried out.

  “Turn around! I have to go back!”

  When Joe glanced into the rearview mirror with a look of confusion and continued to drive toward Deer Harbor, Adele’s right hand slammed against the back of the driver’s seat.

  “Turn around! Right now! And hurry! As fast as you can. Hurry!”

  Joe shook his head, hit the brakes, made a sharp U-turn, and then pushed down onto the accelerator pedal with his right foot while he silently wondered what had gotten into the young woman to make her suddenly act so panicked.

  Adele’s eyes never left the image on her phone. She cursed herself for having missed it while standing in the room.

  It was right there, right in front of me!

  Adele wasn’t sure the condition of what she expected to find back inside the derelict home. After all this time, it was there waiting to be discovered, and the truth to finally be known.

  17.

  At the very moment Adele Plank screamed for Joe to turn his taxi around, Decklan Stone was preparing to kill himself.

  Just ten minutes earlier he had been dropped off at his private dock by two members of the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office. Upon his arrival there, he discovered someone had taken his runabout from Roche Harbor. Decklan didn’t care who might have done so. In the time between his being taken into custody and his release, he had stopped caring about anything. He watched the aluminum hulled, twin-outboard law enforcement boat back away from his island and then abruptly turn and speed away. None of the boat’s occupants bothered to look back at him as he held up his right hand to wave goodbye.

  He knew why.

  For the last twenty-seven years he had always known why.

  Since Calista’s death, Decklan Stone was a monster in the eyes of those who chose to condemn him for his wife’s passing. And though he had effectively retreated from their world, he could not retreat from his own sense of guilt and soul-crushing loss, leading him to always wonder if they were, in fact, right about him.

  Perhaps he was a monster.

  The man known by others simply as “the writer” had finally reached his limit. Convinced he had long ago lived beyond his expiration date, Decklan only wanted twenty-seven years of accumulated looks and whispered accusations to end, and to allow the world, once and for all, to move on without him.

  It’s the humane thing to do…

  People had always disappointed Decklan, but there was no greater disappointment than that which he felt for himself. He recalled looking up and seeing the disgust in Tilda’s eyes as he was marched by her with his hands cuffed behind him. He saw his image reflected in those same eyes, saw how small and inconsequential he had become. She wished him dead. He saw too the others who pointed at him, likely whispering he was the writer who had killed his wife.

  Why not just give Tilda and everyone else what they so clearly want?

  As he sat unmoving and silent in his jail cell, Decklan began to entertain the possibility of ending it all. The more he considered it, the greater its appeal became.

  He was just so tired, so very, very tired.

  By the time his Seattle attorney arrived to expedite his release from the holding cell, Decklan Stone had made up his mind. Thinking his life held so little remaining purpose, he had no intention of seeing another day to its conclusion.

  Years earlier he had made certain that upon his death, his island residence would be given over to a local animal shelter. He thought it appropriate that something nature had made so beautiful should be used by the creatures that inhabited the San Juan Islands.

  He felt a brief pang of guilt when he considered what his death might do to his one remaining friend, Delroy Hicks, but he knew that Delroy was just as likely to follow him in death soon enough.

  That left Adele Plank.

  Decklan had come to care for and admire the young, college journalist. She had shown him the kind of consideration and respect that had been missing for so much of his adult life. But he had granted her the initial interview, and his death would only expedite the genesis of her career. The thought gave Decklan some comfort; he was still capable of helping someone.

  Once the county law enforcement vessel had vanished from view, Decklan turned to stare at the Chris Craft. The large, red, white and blue, wood-hulled vessel appeared to stare back at him, whispering for Decklan to step aboard and revisit an old friend.

  Soon Decklan was seated at the upper-level helm and backing the forty-foot cruiser away from his island home for the final time. The moment he heard the low-pitched, gurgling growl of the twin inboard gas engines, the writer knew he was making the right choice. He thought it only appropriate that his final moments would be upon the very same vessel that he and Calista had loved so much until it became the source for both the tragedy of Calista’s death, and the prolonged tragedy that was the remainder of Decklan Stone’s life.

  Decklan looked up to see the brilliant, white-feathered head of a bald eagle staring down at him as the great bird of prey flew over the Chris Craft. The sky was bathed in soft blue hues, and the wind had a touch of warmth upon it, an undeniable hint of the summer soon to be.

  Calista loved the summer months.

  As Decklan idled the boat past the front portion of his island, he glanced behind him and saw the two chairs jutting out from the cliff that overlooked the water below. He wondered if there was in fact something beyond the painfully brief and tumultuous life known to humankind. Would some version of an afterlife afford him the chance to sit with Calista in those chairs once again?

  The possibility made Decklan’s mouth slowly widen into a content grin as he guided the Chris Craft into deeper waters. He wou
ld know soon enough.

  The author took the first drink from the whiskey bottle after arriving at the approximate center of Deer Harbor. It was nearly three hundred yards in either direction to any shoreline. The Chris Craft’s engines were shut off and its anchor let out to hold the vessel’s position. Within five minutes, half the bottle was emptied.

  Decklan had always considered the area to be the place where Calista had likely fallen off the boat and into the water. He had long been haunted by imagined images of her crying out for him as she watched the Chris Craft continue on its way toward their home. It wouldn’t have been very long before she realized what was going to happen. The frigid water would rob her of the ability to move, to stay afloat, and thus, to stay alive. Perhaps if Decklan had pushed aside his own stubborn pride and checked on her inside the boat, he would have had time to locate and save her. He didn’t do that, though.

  I left her to die out here, all alone…just like the kittens.

  Decklan could feel his head swimming in the numbing pool of his developing drunkenness. He took yet another drink, and then another, until finally the whiskey bottle’s contents were spent. His stomach attempted a revolt, wanting to expel the alcohol, but Decklan clamped his jaws shut and waited for the threatened nausea to pass.

  His eyes scanned the surroundings, noting Orcas Island and San Juan Island, as well as the southern tip of Jones Island. Decklan had to squint and concentrate in order to focus the view. He could hear the waves crashing against the collective island shores in the distance. It was a sound that had always brought him comfort, even in the darkest days immediately following his wife’s passing.

  Decklan was grateful to have that same sound with him at the time of his own chosen conclusion.

  He stood up on legs wobbly with drink and had to reach out with his hand to prevent himself from falling over. The alcohol had served its intended purpose in debilitating him beyond recovery. Decklan moved to the left side of the boat and shuffled slowly toward the bow and then flung his legs over the stainless steel railing so that the only thing preventing him from falling over into the dark and swirling waters below were his hands grasping that same railing behind him.