After drying herself with a kitchen towel, she decided to call her doctor’s office and leave a message. She was pretty certain that nobody was going to be in the office on a holiday, but it would feel good to make the call and get it over with.
She had only taken a couple steps, when she looked out her window and saw the side of Eddie Dees’ house. A thought occurred to her. She tried to dismiss it as being foolish, yet like a snowball, it picked up momentum the more she pondered it. She leaned against her stove and looked out the window.
Did Eddie sneak into the house and take the manuscript? Like another hot flash, her thoughts boiled in her mind. He writes about people who sneak into houses, and he probably knows how to do it himself, doesn’t he? Who else but a writer would want to sneak into my house and take that manuscript?
“But why would a bestselling author want to take my short story?” she said aloud, trying to solve the puzzle.
Because he wants the idea. He wants to take it from you.
“But I was going to give it to him,” she found herself saying, verbally debating the accusative speculations that, like another storm, swept through her mind. “Why steal it?”
Because he doesn’t think you will. Because you’ve been telling him that for a long time, and he’s desperate. Desperate for an idea. Have you noticed how long it’s been since his last book came out? He talked about a deadline, didn’t he? Some publishing deadline? He’s desperate, Marsha, utterly desperate.
“Oh my,” Marsha said. She didn’t fully believe it, but there was a bizarre logic to it.
She went immediately to the bathroom, opened her medicine cabinet, and went for the Xanax. It had been prescribed exactly for days like this. After she took a pill and chased it with a gulp of water from the sink, she looked at herself in the mirror and wrestled with the idea that Eddie Dees was a thief, and a thief of the worst kind. Was it this way with all of his books? Maybe the first book had actually been his, but maybe all of the others had been literary quilts sewn together from the fragments he’d pilfered from other adoring fans.
What other explanation was there for it?
Her more rational, logical side fought the idea: You’re being ridiculous, Marsha. This is the anxiety talking. You know better.
She looked at her doughy face, her deep-set eyes, her tangled mess of brown curls, and she thought she looked older than she had just last night when she stared into this very mirror. The worry lines above her eyebrows were no longer slight but appeared to be deep creases—like the lines on an EKG monitor frozen on her forehead. The crow’s feet around her eyes also looked prominent. All of the excess flesh kind of drooped downward like too much batter on a spatula.
Depressed enough over the manuscript, she headed right to the kitchen.
Grabbing a spoon out of the drawer on her way there, she pulled the carton of peanut butter cup ice cream out of the freezer, wrapped a kitchen towel around it so it wouldn’t be too cold in her grip, and took her seat again at the table.
Time for breakfast.
Chapter Twelve
If Darrel Paisley wasn’t convinced before that his wife was having an affair, the morning of July 4th didn’t help the situation. Darrel went to his home office while his wife was still asleep, looked out over Naples Island and the home of his neighbor two doors down, Eddie Dees, and saw that the storm had broken. His immediate neighbor, Dominic, was the hermit type and barely came out of his house. It looked to be a nice morning. There were still some scattered clouds and perhaps some more coming their way in the distance, but by and large, it looked like he was going to be able to go outside today without having to put on a raincoat.
He had gone through some of his client’s files the previous day, and wanting to get a fresh start for the morning, decided to clear off his desk. After this, he would go downstairs and make breakfast. Since he had gone mostly paperless for the last few years, there was little to pick up. He took Karen Welch, Fred Ortiz, and Jimmy Beck’s files from the desk, glanced through them to make sure everything looked right, and opened the sliding closet door to reveal a row of his personal and business file cabinets. Already looking forward to bagels and coffee, he quickly filed the folders away but noticed, just as he was about to close the sliding door, that one file cabinet at the far end looked slightly ajar.
Those were his and Jenna’s personal files. Tax returns. Passports. Birth certificates. He had gone into it the other day to double check a tax statement and perhaps hadn’t closed it all the way. Not thinking too much about it, but wanting to make sure he had returned everything that he had taken out of it, he opened the drawer.
There were fewer files than the last time he’d checked. Contemplating this, he quickly sifted through the files and tried to figure out what was actually gone. It didn’t take him very long to realize.
“Jenna,” he whispered. Her personal files were gone. They were normally right behind his. Her birth certificate, passport, and other vital documents were gone.
He opened the adjacent cabinets and rifled through them just in case but as he had guessed, there was nothing there but client files. He gave up searching after a few minutes, took a couple horrified steps backwards, and slowly sank down into his office chair. He rocked in that squeaky chair for what seemed like hours and contemplated the meaning of this.
One thing was certain: He hadn’t moved those documents. If it were other files, perhaps he would chalk it up to forgetfulness or just honest misfiling, but Darrel was meticulous when it came to organization. A possible answer slowly and terrifyingly crystallized in his mind.
He thought of Jenna’s wedding ring, which she had supposedly “lost” recently. He thought of the distance he had felt in their relationship these last several months that had crept, like a mist, into their home. And although he couldn’t keep the thoughts from assaulting him, and would have beat them back if possible, his mind turned to his first wife, Suzie, and how that separation and divorce went down.
Married at twenty-one and divorced by twenty-three, he remembered that marriage, so many years later, as a miserable layover on his flight to financial success and happiness. Now, it seemed like just another breakup as opposed to an actual marital dissolution. Too young, too immature, and too poor, Darrel had used that marriage as a lesson many times while his own son was much younger, and it usually went something like this: Do some growing up before you put a ring on someone’s finger.
Suzie, who ended up running off with a guy she met in one of her college classes, had planned her escape for months. She started taking things out of the apartment, piece by piece. When Darrel came home one day after work to a vacant apartment, much of the heavy lifting had already been done. He’d seen some of the signs and had questioned her, but she always had an excuse. By the time she disappeared, she had already opened up a new bank account, had two new credit cards, and had moved all of her things into her boyfriend’s apartment.
Rocking in his office chair, Darrel had to admit this didn’t look good. It didn’t look good at all. First, Jenna’s wedding ring went missing and now all of her personal files were gone too. She would want those if she was really planning on leaving, he thought. Already, he imagined her starting her own bank account, maybe taking out a credit card in her own name, all in preparation for a flight out of her marriage. It was possible, wasn’t it? When Suzie left him, he had been an ignorant imbecile, giddy with newly married optimism, while his wife—behind his back—was sharpening the executioner’s axe. Could it happen again?
“There is a profound fear in a man who experiences tragedy,” he whispered, “the fear that the same thing can happen again.” That was a line he often used with clients who, once burned by the market, learned that they had to go about investing their money differently the second time. But now the quote aptly applied to him.
He promised himself that he would keep careful watch, just in case. Maybe he had misplaced the files when he had last gone through them, though he found that unlikel
y. Perhaps Jenna had gone through the files for some other reason, taken them out, and had simply forgotten to put them back. She was awfully forgetful at times. Yet the more he thought about it, the more he realized how unlikely a scenario that was. She rarely, if ever, stepped foot in his office.
He got up and made his way downstairs, promising himself that he wouldn’t think about it for now. He would brew a pot of coffee and watch the morning weather. From what he understood, the storms weren’t over yet. There was more coming their way.
“Honey, are you downstairs?” Jenna called from the upstairs bedroom.
“Yes! Making coffee!”
But as he began to brew a pot and looked over his living room, his mind couldn’t help but do a silent inventory of the furniture he was sure that Jenna would want and the furniture she would allow him to keep.
Chapter Thirteen
The boy was in front of his house, straddling his BMX bike and crying. Jesse wondered if he had taken a bad spill and injured himself, but something about these cries made him think it was something different entirely. He was pretty sure the boy’s name was Bryan—or Hot-rodder, as his Metropolitan-loving patron Eddie Dees liked to call him.
Jesse was doing his usual morning walk to the Captain’s Room, where he would do some inventory and get things geared up for the day. The Fourth of July would bring in a lot of customers in the afternoon hours who would want to swing by and throw back a few cold ones before running off to parties and firework shows. It would be a good day for business.
He often saw the boy on his bike on his morning walks because the boy lived here. Usually, he was out in front of the house on his bike, circling in the street, popping wheelies. He’d never seen the little guy look this somber and this dejected.
As he walked closer, Jesse was pretty sure he could deduce the cause of the boy’s tears. A man was screaming inside the house, cursing, in the midst of what sounded like a middle-aged man’s temper tantrum. He sounded pretty drunk too.
“I’ve told that idiot kid of mine not to play around with my tools! I’ve told him a thousand times!”
A woman inside tried to calm him down.
“I didn’t take your stupid tools,” the boy said, wiping tears from his face. His breathing was tattered, and his whole body shook.
Jesse, who had walked up to the boy, asked if he was okay, and the boy nodded without saying anything to him or even looking at him. It didn’t take much for Jesse to figure out that the man in the house was the boy’s father.
“I’m gonna kick that kid’s rear!” the boy’s dad yelled belligerently. “I’m gonna take this belt and make his rear bleed, do you hear me, Gina? I’m sick of that stupid kid thinking he runs this place and can just take my tools without asking me.”
The front screen door of the house flew open. A guy wearing a pair of checkered boxers, a white V-neck undershirt, and white socks pulled up to his knees stepped out. He held a black belt in his left hand. A moment later, a woman with blond tousled hair wearing a bathrobe ran out behind him, took the man by the shoulders, and pled with him to come back inside. Mom and Dad argued there on the front porch and eventually made their way back indoors where they continued to yell and curse at each other.
Jesse, whose own dad had been an alcoholic and walked the thin line between abuse and discipline, looked down at the child with great empathy. He’d walked many miles in those same shoes, and from what he could judge, this sort of fighting probably happened a lot at this house.
He knelt beside the kid’s bike. The kid was just about done wiping tears from his face.
“Sorry you have to put up with that, kid,” Jesse said.
“He always blames me, and this time I really didn’t take them,” Bryan said.
“Your old man thinks you took his tools, is that it?”
Bryan nodded.
“And you didn’t, huh?”
“No, but I know what did. It’s been taking everything. It’s been─”
“Bryan, come inside now. I’d like to talk to you,” his mom called. The fighting indoors had subsided, and Bryan’s mother stood by the door, arms crossed in front of her, waiting for her son. At least the yelling had stopped. Maybe she had talked a little sense into her husband and would make sure that belt was used for its proper purpose.
“Good luck,” Jesse said.
The boy went inside, and Jesse was reassured by the silence that followed. He didn’t hear any more screaming, and he didn’t hear that leather belt tearing apart the boy’s hind end.
He continued his walk to the Captain’s Room, and his mind turned once again to business and matters of the day. He was still disturbed by last night and his altercation with Klutch. He had the overwhelming feeling that he hadn’t seen the last of him. Klutch must have been drunk out of his mind to blame Jesse for taking his knife; or, if it wasn’t due to drunkenness, maybe the guy was just that paranoid. Whatever the case, Jesse hoped he wouldn’t have to deal with him anymore.
Jesse finally reached the Captain’s Room and was unlocking the front door when he noticed something missing. It almost didn’t catch his eye, but as he opened the door to his bar, he realized that the big banner he’d hung the night before—like he did every year—was gone. In big red and blue letters, it read: OPEN FOURTH OF JULY! CELEBRATE WITH US! But it wasn’t there. Jesse went inside, turned off the alarm, and then went back outside to contemplate the missing banner.
He’d been putting up banners like that for years when the different holidays rolled around, and nobody had ever taken one down. He wondered for a moment if last night’s storm could have blown it away; there had been a little wind and lots of rain, but not enough, he assumed, to take down the banner. It hadn’t been a hurricane. And if it was because of the storm, where was the banner now? Shouldn’t it be on the ground?
But there was nothing. Just a few puddles along the sidewalk left over from last night’s rain.
It didn’t take long to speculate who had taken down the sign: Klutch. He’d left the park last night, drunk and angry, and had probably driven here, tore down the banner, and cut it into pieces like some kind of sacrificial lamb. Maybe it was his way of getting even for his missing knife.
Jesse went back inside the Captain’s Room, through the back kitchen, and into his tiny, private office. He unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk and took out the Smith & Wesson .38 Special. He loaded it and tucked the gun into his belt. He’d bought the gun years ago and had kept it in the back office for protection in the case of a robbery, but now it was obvious that he needed to keep the gun on him at all times. That guy, Klutch, wasn’t done.
Not yet. Not by a long shot.
Chapter Fourteen
The morning of July 4th, Morgan Grewell waited for the Pill Giver. The pills always made the pressure in his head go away and replaced the aching, congested feeling in his skull with dream-like pleasure and rest. The sun had come up, and Morgan could see the sunlight behind the shutters, which meant the Pill Giver would arrive soon. Morgan thought it was morning, but he’d been wrong before. Time lost all meaning in this place.
He wondered, for a moment, who the Pill Giver was. He remembered the face: pale, sickly skin, black shoulder-length hair, and dark eyes. The Pill Giver usually sat on the edge of his bed and spoke to him about the parasites. He wasn’t sure what the parasites were, but the Pill Giver always talked about them. They were the reason for all the problems, and once gone, everything would be better.
But who was he? Who was the Pill Giver?
Is he my son, Drake, who I’ve lived with all these years? Or maybe he’s my brother, Timmy. Yes, my brother Timmy. He looks like Timmy. He has the same eyes as Timmy. He must─
His head ached, and Morgan closed his eyes and rubbed his temples with emaciated hands. His thoughts didn’t make any sense. It couldn’t have been his brother Tim, because Tim had died just after college in a car accident. He remembered playing baseball with Tim as a kid. A vivid memory from long ago sei
zed him with violent clarity. He remembered being on the beach with Mom and Dad and Tim. Dad was throwing baseballs, and Morgan and his brother were learning how to catch. Seagulls hovered over the waves. It was the perfect day, because he realized that Dad wasn’t just a guy who went to the factory to work. Dad was good at throwing the baseball, and he was a good teacher, and─
Maybe the Pill Giver is Dad. Maybe? But no, Dad is dead. Dad is long dead. It can’t be Dad.
The room was musty and rank. The shutters had been closed for what seemed like an eternity, and he stared mindlessly at the splinters of sunlight that broke through them.
His eyes swam drunkenly across the room to his work desk beside the window, the one that he used to sit at and pay his bills in the evening, and he noticed the shadow that had always been there. At first he thought it was the way the sunlight broke through the shutters, but now was sure it wasn’t a shadow at all; there was a person crouched beside the desk. A Dark Woman. Sometimes he thought he could hear her cry in the middle of the night.
She’s a guardian angel who, knowing something’s wrong, sits in the shadows and weeps.
Morgan realized that his hand was up and he had been clutching at something. What was he grasping for? He only remembered reaching for the shutters and the sunlight behind them. Maybe he was trying to open them. He put his hand down, and realizing how heavy his eyelids felt, decided maybe it was time to go back to sleep. Things were easy and peaceful when asleep.
The door to his room slowly opened. It had always been creaky, just as it was now, and Morgan turned his head as someone came into the room. It was the Pill Giver, the one who made the awful pressure in his head go away. The Pill Giver walked into the room, took a seat at the edge of his bed, and looked at him.
Storm Taken: A Supernatural Thriller Page 7
