Storm Taken: A Supernatural Thriller

by William Michael Davidson

  They seemed to me, in the brief time that I’d been there, the all-American, friendly, work-hard-and-play-hard kind of family. They had one grown son, Sean, who had long ago moved out, and every time I’d chatted with them, they talked excitedly about some vacation that they were planning. They were both quiet, reserved, but the kind of people who would go the extra mile to help you out if you needed something. We’d had dinner at each other’s houses on a few occasions, and we’d stayed up pretty late and gone through far too many bottles of wine, but we always walked away thinking the same thing: we hit the jackpot as far as neighbors are concerned when it came to the Paisleys.

  The Paisleys said hello to us, but Samantha Wheeler was the one who caught my eye. She caught every guy’s eye. Not a day over thirty-five, she was married to some young investment banker who was away on business more than he was home. We’d spoken to her briefly a couple times and once, while I was out walking Bessie, she and I chatted a bit. A tall brunette with long legs, honey-colored skin, and big hazel eyes, she was striking, to say the least. I have to admit when I bumped into her that day on my walk, I felt she desperately wanted attention. Maybe it was because her husband was away so much, or maybe it was because she was just used to having power over men, but I thought there was something quite flirtatious and inviting about Samantha Wheeler.

  I think the first time I noticed Bessie missing was when our impromptu meeting with the neighbors broke up. The Paisleys, always smiling, were waving goodbye and heading toward their castle on the water, and Marsha, bracelets clinking around her wrists, was about to head back to her house to bake some cookies, when a massive, seemingly-unending fork of lightning ripped through the sky. It was followed, just a moment after, by a virtual sonic boom. I could feel it in my toes. And then the first bit of real drizzle started.

  We all looked up in amazement, and then I looked around for Bessie. She was funny when it came to storms. Up in Washington, she wasn’t like most dogs that wanted to hide out when the thunder and lightning were at their worst; she always wanted to be with Madison and me. I always said it was because she was a lover, but my wife thought she was just a plain sissy.

  Yet I didn’t see her anywhere. Strange.

  Our farewells were interrupted briefly as we gawked and commented on how massive that bolt of lightning had been and how much darker the clouds had gotten in just the last few minutes, when Drake walked out of his front door. He lived across the canal in a three-story Victorian home just alongside Samantha Wheeler’s. I had never spoken to him; in fact, I think it’s safe to say that none of us had ever spoken a word to Drake. I didn’t even know what his last name was, but, as neighbors talk, we knew enough.

  He was probably in his early twenties and lived with his father, who, according to local legend, was suffering some kind of debilitating illness and hadn’t left the house for months. I don’t think it would be fair to describe Drake as the gothic type, but in my short time there, he always seemed to be wearing black jeans and a black sweatshirt. Gangly, pale-faced, and shy, he usually walked past our home without any type of acknowledgement. His head was usually dropped forward, his eyes always on the ground in front of him, and my wife described him as most of the other neighbors did: creepy.

  On that first night of storms, we watched as Drake walked out of the front door of his house. He had a giant duffel bag slung over his shoulder and from what we could tell, it looked pretty heavy. He opened the gate in front of his house and lugged the bag down the little gangway to his private dock. The waterfront homes in Naples Island have their own private docks, though the only things on our dock are two kayaks left over from the previous owner. I keep telling myself that I’ll get down there and try one out, but exercise isn’t exactly my thing.

  Drake threw his bloated duffel bag into the back of his small Duffy, an electric boat, and began to untie it from the dock.

  “Kinda weird to be taking the boat out just as this storm’s about to hit,” Darrel Paisley said, and his wife agreed.

  “Devil worshipper,” Marsha said. “That’s what I think. Or maybe just a druggie.”

  After untying from the dock, Drake steered his electric Duffy down the canal and out of sight. At this point, the rain was more than just a drizzle, and we all bolted inside. My wife and I grabbed our cheese plate and our glasses of wine and headed indoors.

  Chapter Three

  My nine-year-old son, Toby, was on the couch, playing video games. I swear that’s all that kid ever did. At least his older brother enjoyed listening to music and playing music. There was something admirable in that. But on most days, I was pretty sure that Toby would be content to spend all day in front of some video game with an IV sugar drip inserted into his arm.

  “Are you ever gonna stop playing that thing?” I asked. I might as well have been talking to the wall. “Hello? Anyone there?”

  His eyes were glazed over. Toby didn’t even blink.

  “This boy needs some professional help,” I said, setting our glasses of wine down in the kitchen. For the second time that afternoon, I realized I hadn’t seen Bessie for a while. I scanned the living room for a sign of her and didn’t come up with anything. “Hon, have you seen Bessie? I haven’t seen her in a while.”

  “No.” She shrugged, taking a bite of cheese. “Not since earlier today.”

  “Well, where is she?”

  “I don’t know. Probably sleeping.”

  A flash of lightning filled the house, followed by a loud peal of thunder. The rain fell relentlessly, and by this time I was pretty convinced that something wasn’t right. Bessie loves being with people. Even if she had heard the first cracks of thunder and had run into another room because she was scared, she would have come back by now. That was just the way she was.

  I did a walk-through of the house and checked under every bed and behind every piece of furniture but didn’t come up with anything. By the time I did my second walk-through, my wife was taking me seriously. Madison did the second search with me, and we couldn’t find anything. We even looked in closets and showers, but there was no sign of Bessie. We stopped in the kitchen when we were done, looked at each other, and didn’t know what to make of it.

  “You did look out in the backyard, right?” Madison asked me.

  “Well, no. Why would she be sitting in a rainy backyard when there’s a warm house here? Plus, you know how little that yard is. And there’s no shelter.”

  Madison rolled her eyes. Anyone who has ever lived on Naples Island knows we don’t have much in the way of yards. With waterfront property being so valuable along with builders trying to maximize every square inch, residents are pretty lucky if they have a ten-by-ten patio out back. That was about what we had.

  My wife, having peeled back the curtains, looked out as the rain poured down endlessly on the back patio, but there was no sign of Bessie anywhere.

  Toby was still engrossed in his game, and we could hear Owen playing keyboard in his room upstairs. We didn’t want to say anything to them yet, especially Toby, who had gone with us to pick Bessie up from the pound. But it seemed like the writing was pretty much on the wall at this point. The dog was gone.

  “When did you see her last?” Madison asked.

  “I don’t know. A little before we went out front with our wine, I guess.”

  “She couldn’t have gotten past us, could she?”

  “No way. We were sitting right there. Unless she slipped past us during my momentary distraction with your boobs.”

  That earned a slight grin from Madison.

  “They are quite distracting at times.”

  “Well, we have to keep looking,” she said.

  “But where? We’ve gone through the whole house. Twice. And you know as well as I do, she wouldn’t last a minute out there in the rain. She’d be back in a heartbeat.”

  “Well, we must have missed something. You look down here.”

  I agreed and walked through the downstairs, opened every closet door, and
looked behind every piece of furniture in the remote possibility that Bessie might be in hiding, but after a while it just became ridiculous. She just wasn’t like that.

  I took a seat in my leather chair in the downstairs office where I spent my early mornings drinking coffee and meeting my daily word quota. I looked out the blurred window of rain, listened to what sounded like a million watery nails being hammered into the shingles of our home, and knew that I would eventually have to go outside to look for her.

  I got up from my chair and glanced out at the rain one last time, and I noticed Drake returning to his dock. The hood of his black sweatshirt covered his face. He looked completely drenched as he climbed out of his Duffy and tied up to his dock. In a hurry to escape the rain, he jumped back into his boat to retrieve his duffel bag, and then climbed back out and ran to the front door of his home.

  Only now, it looked like the duffel bag was empty.

  The idea first entered my head as I was about to leave my home office. I paused for a moment in the doorway and caught myself, almost unwillingly, slowly looking back toward the window and the strange dark figure sloshing forward to the front door of his house.

  The duffel bag. It was carrying something before he’d gotten onto that boat. Something heavy. Something no longer in it.

  Something about the size of Bessie.

  Devil worshipper, Marsha had said. I’d read stories about those people before, and I remembered how I’d seen Drake walking by the house earlier that day. I’d seen him walk through the back alley behind my house on more than one occasion. And certainly he was tall enough to reach over the gate and undo the latch.

  “Is it possible?” I whispered in the silence of my office. “Is it really possible?”

  Chapter Four

  I put in a little time writing before searching for Bessie.

  I was up at my usual five o’clock, sitting at my desk with a steaming cup of coffee, all seventy thousand words of my manuscript on the screen in front of me. Writing is all about momentum. For me, even missing a day or two knocks me completely off rhythm. On a good day, I’ll crank it out till about noon and then spend my afternoon doing edits. On a bad day, I might throw in the towel around ten. But spending too long away from a story is like being a blacksmith who hammers at cold metal. You have to pound on the anvil while it’s hot.

  But as I sat in my leather chair and watched the first light of dawn show itself, I knew I wasn’t going to get much done. My wife and I had gone to bed without telling our sons because, what was the point? Miraculously, they hadn’t noticed that she was missing. The rain had come down heavy that night, without interruption, and we knew it would be pretty ridiculous to start a search in those conditions. I’d thrown on my jacket and checked the houses near us before going to bed, but that hadn’t amounted to anything. We figured it would be better to wait until morning when there was light and it was clear enough to see. I tried not to think of Drake and his duffel bag. My mind couldn’t completely go there quite yet.

  I sat in my chair for twenty minutes, sipping coffee and trying to get back into the book I’d been grinding away on for the last four months, until I realized that I just couldn’t do it.

  I closed the laptop, decided I’d go out, and went to the closet and threw on my jacket. The rain had stopped and there was enough light that I could at least walk up and down the island and do my due diligence. I decided not to wake up Madison. She loved that dog, but I think she loved sleeping in even more, and it wouldn’t hurt for me to get outside and put in an hour on my own. If things went well, I’d find her hiding under some neighbor’s bushes, and the kids would never even know she was gone. Then I could plop back down at my desk and pound away on that anvil.

  But I had no such luck. I walked up and down our stretch of the island twice. The first time I was respectful of the neighbors and kept quiet, but the second time I didn’t care, and I called for Bessie every ten feet or so. I’m sure many people on Naples Island sat at their breakfast tables later that morning and while drinking their coffee, wondered if they had dreamt of some madman running around yelling “Bessie!” or if it had actually happened.

  After two laps around the island, realizing the futility of my endeavor, I returned home and woke up Madison. We sat on the corner of our bed and had absolutely no idea where to begin.

  “Okay, why don’t I make some posters to put up around the neighborhood,” Madison said, finally getting out of bed. “Did you get the new ink cartridge for your printer?”

  “No.”

  “Alright, then I’ll have to use Owen’s.”

  “Owen’s?” I said, half-laughing. “Good luck with that. He probably didn’t go to bed until a few hours ago, and you know what it’s like waking him up.”

  “Well, he can sleep right through it then, can’t he?”

  “If you can find the printer. That room of his has a way of swallowing things up and transporting them to some other dimension. What about Toby? He’ll be up soon. Should we tell him? You know how much he loves Bessie. This is gonna crush the poor guy.”

  “I’ll talk to him. Moms are good at that kind of thing. Why don’t you go for another romp around the block. Bessie couldn’t have gotten far. And I’ll call the pound just in case somebody turned her in.”

  We both knew that didn’t make much sense because Bessie had a nametag with both of our phone numbers on it, but neither of us mentioned it.

  I turned away to resume my search, but my wife grabbed me by the tail of my shirt and pulled me back onto the bed. She leaned in toward me, kissed me on the cheek, and despite the breath─she hadn’t brushed her teeth yet─I found her quite appealing at that moment. She rubbed her index finger down the side of my face.

  “If you recall, you said you’d prefer to take care of business inside instead of outside, right? That’s what you said.”

  “Yes, that’s what I said, but, come on, we have a missing dog on our hands.”

  She was already taking off my shirt. When my wife is on a mission, she wastes no time.

  “Well, then I think before we begin this search, it’s important to fulfill our marital duties. Plus, and don’t take this personally, but based on prior experiences, this probably won’t take very long anyway.” She winked.

  Before I knew what was happening, my shirt was off and so was hers.

  The rescue mission would have to be temporarily delayed.

  Chapter Five

  Having dutifully fulfilled my marital obligations, I set out on my third and final trip around the island, only this time I knew I was on a fool’s quest. If Bessie really was hiding out under a patio in someone’s front yard, she would have come out long ago. If some neighbor had kindly taken her in from the storm, we most certainly would have received a phone call.

  By the time I returned to my front door, I knew that something strange must have happened. I admit that as I stood by the front door of my house after that search, I looked for a long time at Drake’s Duffy across the way, and I felt seized by horror.

  I decided to cross one of the many bridges extending over the canal and pay a visit to Drake’s property. I wouldn’t go up to the door and knock—I had no real reason to yet—but it might be helpful to just walk by his house and glance over things, then stop by Samantha’s and ask if she’d heard anything unusual the night before.

  As I made my way there, I noticed Marsha step outside. The front door to her house slammed shut. She was wearing a red apron over her muumuu with the words KITCHEN DIVA written on it in bright orange lettering. She brushed remnants of flour off her hands as she approached me.

  “Hello, Mr. Dees! Speak of the devil!” she said. “I was just about to head over to your house and ask your lovely wife if I might borrow some brown sugar.”

  I side-stepped a large puddle and advanced toward her. “Well, I’m certain she wouldn’t mind loaning you some. She should be home making some flyers to put up in the neighborhood. You see, it seems Bessie ran away last night
. We can’t find her anywhere. You didn’t happen to see anything, did you?”

  “Oh, my dear Lord,” Marsha said, aghast. With her flour-caked hands holding both sides of her face, she looked like a woman who had just been told that World War III had begun and the fighting was taking place in her own backyard. “That poor, poor dog. And to think of all the rain that came down last night and the thunder and the lightning. Poor, poor thing. And the news this morning said another wave is going to hit us. Oh, that poor dog.”

  “It’ll probably be fine,” I said, and I resisted the urge to reach out and put my hand on her shoulder to console her. It didn’t occur to me until after our brief conversation how unusual it was for me─the owner of the dog─to be the one consoling my neighbor. But that’s how things went with Marsha Walker.

  “No sign at all of her?” she asked.

  “No, not yet, but I’m not too worried. Bessie could only have gotten so far. I’m sure some neighbor on another strip of the island took her in for the night, and we’ll get a call any moment that she’s doing just fine. We’re going to put up some flyers just to be safe. I’m sure by the time you’re done baking whatever you’re baking, Bessie will be back to her normal routine."

  Marsha nodded. Her eyes looked a little teary. “Well, I’ll be praying for your family and Bessie,” she said solemnly. Again, so sincere and dramatic an expression over a missing dog that was most likely alive and well in some neighboring house struck me as odd, but I knew Marsha’s intentions and I appreciated it.

  I thanked her for her support, chatted for a brief moment about that short story of hers and how she was going to send it my way once it was ready, and eventually headed across one of the small bridges to Samantha Wheeler’s side of the water. Marsha headed to my house, where she would pick up some brown sugar and lavish more condolences on my wife.