As I crossed the bridge, I couldn’t help noticing how clean and fresh the air was that morning. My wife and I, while happy to escape what often felt like the constant deluge of Seattle rainfall, had always loved going for a walk the morning after a downpour. Especially the morning after one of the first rainfalls of the season. There was always something invigorating about it.
Just as I went over the crest of the small bridge to the other side of the canal, I saw Hot-rodder come my way on his tiny BMX bike. Hot-rodder wasn’t his real name; Bryan was his real name, but ever since I saw him on my first weekend living on the island, I had dubbed him with that title. Probably about twelve years old, the little rug rat was a wide-eyed, scruffy, smiley, mischievous-looking kid who reminded me of my younger brother, Alan, before he passed away at the same age. He also reminded me of a pure and good time in my life. Someone once told me that writers write to recapture their youth. I think there’s some truth in that. With Hot-rodder, I felt like I was being transported to another time.
“Mr. Eddie!” he screamed, peddling toward me. He had glued a card (the ace of spades) to the frame over the back wheel of his bike so it penetrated the spokes. When the wheels turned, it sounded like a helicopter. He kicked on the brakes and skidded to a stop just in front of me, wiping sweat from his forehead. He met me with a big, voracious smile. “Word of the day!” he piped.
“Okay, word of the day,” I said, thinking. It took me a moment. “Exorbitant.”
“Exorbitant,” he said. He scratched his scruffy mop of hair and looked up at me, squinting in the morning sunlight. “I give up. What is it?”
“Overly expensive. Superfluous.”
“Superfluous,” he repeated, barely able to form the word on his tongue. He seemed to chew on that word for a few minutes, quite content, and then, as if he just realized he was late to some very important meeting, jumped back on his bike. “Cool! Thanks, Mr. Eddie!”
He was gone, like the little tornado that he was. He peddled hard down the other side of the little bridge and I heard the card─his imaginary engine─disappear in the distance.
I don’t think I’d ever seen Hot-rodder without his bike, but our word of the day tradition began the first time I’d met him. I had asked him for directions, and when he asked me who I was and what I did, I was immediately impressed. What eleven- or twelve-year-old kid asks an adult what he does for a living? I liked the curiosity in him, because I could tell that was why he asked it─not because he’d been taught to. He really wanted to know, and when I told him I was a writer, he told me he wanted me to teach him a new word every time we ran into each other.
And so the tradition began.
I crossed to the other side of the canal and walked past Drake’s Victorian home. I thought again of the duffel bag I’d seen him carrying on and off his Duffy the night before, and I debated about walking down to his private dock to search his boat. Perhaps there would be answers or evidence of some kind. But knowing that Drake’s neighbor, Samantha Wheeler, might have some information, I decided to maintain my course and start with her.
I felt a bit nervous as I walked up to the front door of her ultra-modern home. The last thing I wanted was for my impromptu visit to fuel Samantha’s attraction; that wasn’t my goal.
I pressed the green luminescent doorbell and, a moment later, Samantha was at the door wearing only spandex shorts and a sports bra. She had a bottle of Avian water in her hand and a workout towel draped over her shoulder. Clearly, she had just finished a round of cardio-something.
“Eddie!” she said. I think it was a greeting. It also sounded like a pleasant surprise. She took her towel off her shoulder and wiped her face, and I was surprised to notice that even with no make-up and her face dripping in sweat, she was pretty stunning.
“Hi, Samantha. I hope you don’t mind me just swinging by like this.”
“Mind?” she said. “Why would I mind? Of course you can. Any time.”
I’m sure she thinks that about many men, I thought. Sam was lonely, plain and simple. A hundred other guys could have knocked on her door that morning and she would have been just as happy to see them.
“Well, I just had a quick question. Bessie, our retriever, is missing. I’ve patrolled the neighborhood several times in hope of finding her, but to no avail. You haven’t seen her or anything, have you?”
“No, I’m sorry, I haven’t. Would you like to come inside?”
“Thanks, but I should probably be heading back home soon. No sign of Bessie?”
She shook her head.
“Well, I did have one more question then, and this one concerns your neighbor. You know who I’m talking about?”
She wrinkled her nose and nodded. Drake was, in our little neck of the woods, the unpleasant odor everyone was aware of but didn’t always want to acknowledge.
“You haven’t seen anything unusual next door, have you? Or heard anything? Anything strange last night, particularly?”
Her eyes went wide. She started to say something, stopped to rethink what she was going to say, and then started again.
“You know what, I didn’t really think about it until you mentioned it, but yeah. There was something kind of weird yesterday.”
“What?”
“You’re going to want to come inside for this, Eddie,” she said, pointing toward Drake’s front porch only feet away from hers. She wanted to be out of earshot.
I followed her obediently into her house. The inside continued the theme of modern décor, and I found myself sitting on a curved, steel barstool in her kitchen that looked much more uncomfortable than it was. When I first saw the row of barstools surrounding the enormous granite island, I thought they looked like NASA projects that had been converted to furniture. Strange modern stuff.
She handed me a bottle of water and began to drink some green vegetable concoction she had blended just prior to my arrival. She offered me some, but I declined. My wife had tried, just a year before that, to get me into juicing. Liquefied broccoli, kale, spinach? No, thank you. I’ll stick with my One A Day.
“So what exactly did you see?” I asked.
Sam sipped her green juice. “It’s not really what I saw, it’s what I heard,” she explained. “To be honest with you, I haven’t thought much of it until now. Yesterday afternoon, before the storm set in, I was sitting here in my kitchen, going through mail, when I thought I heard something on my back patio.”
“What do you mean something? Thunder? Lightning?”
“No, it sounded like a door blowing open, followed by a loud metallic sound. I assumed that something in the backyard must have fallen over, so I looked out the sliding glass door to the patio and noticed the shed door was open. My husband keeps some of his woodworking tools in that shed. It’s an old hobby of his.
“I thought a gust of wind must have blown it open, but even that seemed strange to me because it’s usually latched, so I went out to the shed to close it. Everything seemed normal, but I did see one thing that struck me as odd. The saw. It wasn’t where it normally was.”
“Saw?”
“Yes. You have to understand, my husband is a Type A personality to the max. He’s always doing little projects when he’s home, and he keeps those tools meticulously organized. One of the saws was missing from the sidewall, and I remembered the warbling metallic sound I’d heard, like a saw hitting our side of the wall. I imagined that weirdo next door jumping over the concrete fence of his backyard, opening the shed, taking the saw, and then jumping back over to his side. I know it sounds weird, and it was just a fleeting thought. By the time I was back inside and dried off, I’d pretty much dismissed it. But when you asked me if I’d seen anything weird going on at Drake’s last night, it just all came back to me.”
I sipped the bottled water that Samantha had offered me. I still didn’t understand much of what was happening, but I didn’t like the possibilities. Devil worshipper, Marsha had said. A missing dog. A stolen saw. A freak next door with a d
uffel bag. Was it really possible that Drake was involved in this?
“Did you ask your husband about the saw?”
“No. Like I said, I didn’t even think about it again until now. I can text him, though.”
“Why don’t you? It might help.”
“I know he’s kind of a weird guy, but why would Drake want to steal a saw out of my husband’s shed? I just don’t get that. And what would that have to do with your missing dog? Am I missing something?”
Perhaps several points on an IQ score, I thought, but I held my tongue. Samantha Wheeler clearly wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed —no pun intended —but I really couldn’t blame her for being unable to connect some of the dots. After all, she hadn’t seen Drake get off his Duffy with that empty duffel bag, and maybe her mind wasn’t quite as sick and twisted as mine was. Maybe all the creative writing had truly warped my imagination.
“What time did you hear all that and close the shed?” I asked.
“Not sure. A little before I talked to you and the neighbors last night. Just as the storm was beginning to make its appearance.”
The timeline fit perfectly, and my heart sank because of it. I didn’t want to think anybody could be guilty of something so perverse.
“I’ve heard some noises in his backyard recently,” she continued. “He seems to be moving around in his garage a lot. You can look down from our bedroom and make out something going on down there through the trees. I’ve always just assumed he’s been cleaning it out or reorganizing it or something.”
“Really?” I said, and then I had an idea. “Can I come back tonight maybe about nine or so, and just peek out of that window to see what he’s doing?”
“Sure,” she said, shrugging. But I could tell she looked a little puzzled. ”Is there something going on? Something you’re looking for?”
“I’ll know when I see it,” I said, and I thanked her for her time. I excused myself to return home to assist with the posting of lost dog signs throughout the neighborhood.
As I stepped out of her house, I realized what I’d just done. I had been in a woman’s home —a ridiculously hot woman wearing only spandex shorts and a sports bra and had made an appointment with her to come back and visit her bedroom that night.
“A lot of men would be jealous of you,” I mumbled to myself as I began to cross the small bridge that led back to my side of the canal. But by the time I reached the other side, I was mumbling something else entirely.
“Idiot. Moron. Fool.”
Chapter Six
I spent that evening at the Captain’s Room, a small haunt I’d discovered my first week living on the island. It’s a dark, cozy, and relatively quiet bar on Second Street, the two-mile thoroughfare that runs through the island.
That night, the place looked as usual. Larry of the Long Island Ice Teas was sitting in his usual spot at the bar, right in the corner, dressed in a t-shirt and flip flops. I had been to the Captain’s Room about a dozen times, and Larry had been sitting in the same spot and drinking the same type of drink every time I’d been there. I’d talked to him briefly a couple times, and when I did, it seemed like he really only enjoyed talking about his wife and what a horrible person she was; I had noticed that his wife’s villainy seemed to increase with his alcohol consumption. Larry loved talking at times, but more often, he just sipped his drink and played on his phone.
There were a few others I hadn’t seen before. I’d noticed a Harley out front, and when I went inside I saw a biker sitting at one of the back tables, drinking a beer. I didn’t pay much attention to him when I first walked in. I found a place at the bar a few seats down from Larry, and Jesse threw a napkin down on the bar in front of me.
“The usual?” Jesse asked. A middle-aged man always dressed in a flannel shirt, with a grizzly beard halfway down to his belt buckle, he looked like he should be living in the back woods somewhere as opposed to working a bar here on Naples Island. He had moved to Naples several years before from Louisiana to be closer to his son and also to start the bar. His son worked there with him. I’d seen him on a few occasions running dishes and pouring drinks. With sun-bleached hair, bronze skin, and usually wearing Hawaiian shirts, his son looked like he lived in a completely different universe than his dad. You couldn’t get much different if you tried.
“You got it.”
“You like those Metropolitans, huh?” Jesse asked.
He turned to make my drink. It was the only thing I’d ordered there. I’ve never been a big fan of beer, and I had enough good wine in my own cellar back home. Not long after college, a friend had introduced me to Metropolitans. It’s been my “go to” drink ever since.
As I waited for my drink, I reflected on the day. After breaking the news to Toby—who took it as poorly as we thought he would—we had taken a family hike through the island and posted missing dog posters up and down the streets. We even woke up Owen to help us. He, of course, complained the whole time, as I suppose most teenagers are apt to do if woken up before noon.
After that, we took our sons into Belmont Shore for lunch at a little Mexican restaurant called Fish Taco Cantina. We’d fallen in love with the salsa on our first visit there. We even got some ice cream cones after and went for a stroll, all of which, of course, was really an attempt to get Toby’s mind off Bessie. Owen, as I suspected, was pretty unaffected by the whole matter. He was taking his new girlfriend to the movies that night, a little blond girl in the neighborhood I had met on one previous occasion. Her name was Candice. I couldn’t believe he already had a “lady friend.” He had wasted no time.
My wife had called Long Beach Animal Care Services earlier that day to see if a Golden Retriever that matched Bessie’s description had been brought to any of the facilities, and when the answer was no, my mind couldn’t help but drift to thoughts of Drake, his duffel bag, and whatever he was doing in that backyard of his. After a long day of dealing with kids and not getting a moment of writing in, Madison granted me permission to head over to the Captain’s Room just as the sun was setting and just as another storm was making its way toward us. She was going to watch a movie with Toby—further effort to distract him.
It was nice to get in a little alone time. Sometimes I brought a book to the Captain’s Room and found a spot at one of the back tables and read while sipping my Metropolitan. But on that night, it felt nice to sit at the bar and just unwind.
“There you go, my friend,” Jesse said, placing the drink on the napkin before me. “Anything else?”
“I think I’ll just stick with this for now, thanks.”
“Keeping out of the rain tonight, huh?” he asked. “The weather report says the storm’s gonna be worse tonight than last night. That was quite a downpour, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, it was. My dog even ran away last night. Spent all day putting up fliers and everything for her.”
Jesse’s son, who was walking by at that moment, overheard me and said, “Oh, dude, that was you. I saw those signs on my way here. Totally lame.”
“Yep,” I said, and then Surfer Dude disappeared back into the kitchen.
“You and your wife going to watch the fireworks tomorrow night?” Jesse asked. “It’d probably be a good way to get to know people, being new here. It’s usually a pretty good time.”
“Yeah, I think we’re going.”
The following day was only the third of July, but Naples had always prided itself on its own little fireworks show on the third. It was a smaller, more intimate affair for the local residents, and most people living in Naples joked that it was an appetizer for the big fireworks show the following night down by the beach on the mainland. But the island had its own tradition on the Fourth as well. The central park on the small island hosted bands, food, drinks, and what was supposed to be a festive and family-friendly afternoon and evening for local residents. The Paisleys had already invited us to attend both nights with them, and we were very much looking forward to it.
“Hopefull
y this storm activity will let up,” Jesse said. “I guess we’ll just have to cross our fingers.”
“I guess so.”
The biker guy from the back table walked up to the bar just then and slammed an empty beer glass on the bar top. He was a big guy with a shaved head and caramel colored skin, clad in leather. He had piercing dark eyes, a goatee, and one of his eyebrows was missing a chunk of hair in the middle.
“Gimme another Guinness,” the biker said, looking blankly at Jesse and then at me. He swayed drunkenly for a moment, and then went back to his table.
“Who was that?” I asked when he was out of earshot.
“A jerk,” Jesse said and called his son out of the back kitchen to pour the beer. “He started coming in here a few days ago.”
“Yeah, he didn’t seem like the nicest guy.”
“He introduced himself once as Klutch.”
“Klutch?”
“Yeah, who knows? A biker name or something. But I can tell you one thing kinda weird that happened when he was here last night.” Jesse leaned toward me just to make sure he wouldn’t be overheard. As he did, his son, who had poured a new glass of Guinness, walked it over to Klutch’s table. “Our register came up a hundred dollars short.”
“A hundred dollars short?”
“Yep. Now, I didn’t see anything, so I can’t make any outright accusations or prove anything, but I’m telling you this register was short. And the only person sitting in here—for one stretch, at least—was that idiot. We mustn’t have closed the register. He noticed and reached his greasy little fingers into the register while I was in the back grabbing something. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“You thought about confronting him with it?”
“I don’t think that’d go over too well,” Jesse said, stroking his beard. “And again, what evidence do I have? Could be a miscount, but I highly doubt it. I’m just watching closely for the next round to see what happens.”
Storm Taken: A Supernatural Thriller Page 3
