Psychological Thriller Boxed Set

by Addison Moore

  I head upstairs, startled to note the wall of family pictures my mother proudly displayed throughout the years has been dismantled. In its place are the sparse pictures of Allison, Reagan, and me. A few of my father posing with his gold clubs, one of him on a deep-sea fishing trip he once took.

  Odd. But it must be depressing to look at all of the faces that have passed each and every day. I wish I knew he was having such a tough time. I flick the light on in the master bedroom, a simple room, white bedding, rocker in the corner, a nightstand, and a lamp. My mother used to heap a basket of her knitting needles in the corner, and she had the occasional magazine lying around. Her latest fiction read would be in hardback form right next to her side of the bed. I make my way to the closet, a walk-in that my brothers, sister, and I would use as our clubhouse growing up, and flick on the light.

  My heart drops. The entire left side of the closet has up and vanished.

  My mother died a year ago. Of course, she didn’t need any of those things anymore, but didn’t he? I stagger over to the dresser and pull open drawer after drawer, but all I come up with are men’s socks, my father’s underwear, an entire drawer dedicated to baseball hats.

  “Crap.” I snap them all shut. “Where did you put her?” I head to the hall and pull out the hide-a-ladder embedded in the ceiling. The attic is where my father kept all of those pesky things we once took pride in possessing out of sight, Christmas decorations—something my father dubbed seasonal crap, old bankers boxes filled with memories, trophies, ancient artwork ready to crumble at a glance, and volumes and volumes of the scrapbooks my mother worked on like some Lifetime marathon. She loved to document our existence while most of us still existed.

  The light flickers on, blinking in and out as if it were still considering its options, exposing the gossamer ensconced rotted out wood beams, the floor covered in a patchwork of plywood. I take in a nice hearty breath of that old familiar scent, sweet aged pine coated in dust—house breath Rachel used to call it. I have learned over the years that every home has a scent, and ours smelled like kindling sweet and ripe for the burn.

  My eyes track over to the left and I stop mid-breath. Where once stood a towering mountain of all our memories, every over brimming box filled with Price family pride and joy, now lies a wasteland. Nothing but cobwebs and an empty space that feels large enough to park a semi in.

  “What the hell.” I sink down and take a seat on the squeaky floorboards, a plume of dust rising around me. He did it. He hauled every last speck of who we were, of who my mother was, and tossed it to the curb like some old relic that belonged in the junkyard. I leap down, shut the ladder with a thundering crash, and open closets and drawers, looking in every nook and cranny, scouring the garage like a thief looking to steal, but there isn’t one sign of anything. Every last drop of my mother, my brothers and sister has been effectively erased.

  I stagger back inside, back to the hall of horrors, as my brother and I used to call it, and scan the pictures one by one. I find myself, almost relieved that I wasn’t entirely erased, but Wilson, Aston, Rachel—my God, what did they even look like? My mind is refusing to give them up at the moment. But the most startling omission of all is that of my mother. Why in the hell would my father want to wipe out the memory of her? I realize that grief is a bitch. I intimately know that, but this kind of a purposeful cleansing feels outright evil. Soulless. And just like that, my heart sinks. My mother doesn’t live here anymore, not in any sense of the word. What I wouldn’t give to hear her voice one more time, have one last conversation.

  A brisk knock to the front door causes my spine to buck. We’ve never had trick-or-treaters here, not when I was young at least. The house is too far off from the street. I head on over, fully expecting to find a concerned neighbor. I bet they miss my father plodding around his cozy little compound, complaining about the weather, bitching about the lawlessness disease that’s gripped our nation. Barking the wages of sin is death at the top of his lungs at every God-awful hour. Instead, I swing the door open to find a well coifed, painted lipped, tits out and proud Monica Phillips.

  “Crap,” I mutter, not even trying to hide it. She’s made no secret of the fact she’s still after me. But I wouldn’t entertain it—not even months ago, if she were in L.A. and wearing a string bikini on a day that my dick decided it couldn’t get any harder without begging for relief. Not even on that day would Monica Phillips had been a prospect. And on that note, I wish to God she had been my neighbor back in L.A. because I never would have cheated. Allison and I never would have moved—she would have hated having Monica as our neighbor, but that nightmare could nowhere near compare to the one my infidelity embroiled me in. Embroiled Reagan in.

  “Is that any way to greet an old friend?” She gives a hard wink. “You going to invite me in or what?”

  I open the door just enough for her to slither inside with her high-heeled boots, her too tight dress, shiny around the waist from the fabric stretching thin.

  “My, my, let’s do the time warp, my friend.” She does an awkward hitchhiking motion with her hand. “Some things never change.”

  “We’ve changed.” I follow her over to the sofa and motion for her to take a seat as I fall into my old man’s favorite chair. “Dad’s chair.” I slap the armrest. “We used to monkey around on it as kids, but as soon as we heard that old Caddy pull up, we bolted for the four corners of the house.”

  Her smile pulls tight, bright red and dangerous. Monica always did have a demonic flare about her. “You kids were afraid of your daddy.” Her inked in brows hike high into her forehead. “I don’t see why not. Everyone else feared him, too.”

  My mind does its best to push back the curtain of the past and try to decipher if this were true. “Rachel once said she hated him.” I’m not sure why I confessed it, but it felt cathartic to say it out loud, and right here in the room she said it in. “It was after Wilson died. She accused him of wanting us to be perfect.”

  Monica expels a low guttural laugh. “Everyone knew the Price kids were perfection. When your father runs the county courthouse and your mother runs the social circles, you kids had no choice but to mind your p’s and q’s. It was practically mandated for you to live out a flawless existence. If your parents were about anything, it was keeping pretenses. They made sure everyone knew it, too.”

  A chuckle bounces through me. “That was old school Mom and Pops. Back in the day when there were still four Price children, my parents made sure everyone knew how good-natured we were, how congenial, how brilliant.” Wilson, Rachel, and Aston bounce through my mind, each one neatly tucked under a bed of dirt. Aston had a closed casket funeral, but I still see Wilson and Rachel sleeping peacefully in their formalwear, a rose tucked between their folded hands. “And now they’re perfectly dead.”

  “Whoa, that got dark fast. Not you—you’re not dead.” She leans in, ready to pounce. Monica has been my self-appointed cheerleader for as long as I can remember. “What are you doing here, anyway? Stalking these empty halls, looking for a ghost? Are you picking up a few things for your father?”

  “No. You had it right the first time. I’m looking for a ghost. My mother’s to be exact. He’s deleted her. No pictures, no clothes, not a bottle of her perfume. The attic’s been cleared out. It’s as if she never existed.”

  Her face contorts in surprise, and in this low-lighting it offers a macabre effect. “What about the basement?”

  She doesn’t finish the word before I bolt past the kitchen, down the dark mouth of the steep stairwell that leads to the dungeon as it was better known in our house, and my heart gives an erratic thump because no matter how old I get, this dank, musty pit still has the power to strike fear in me. Without fear of being called a pussy, I can honestly say I’m glad Monica is here, clacking her heels at breakneck speed in an attempt to keep up with me.

  I flick the lights on, heart pounding into my ears, and squint at the dusty, arid space with mold spores floating to the ceilin
g.

  “Empty.”

  Monica swats me as she makes her way deeper into the pit. “It’s not empty. What do you call this?” She gives a barren bookshelf a quick thump.

  “My father’s crap.” My father managed to salvage a few pieces of furniture from his own father’s estate. My grandfather was a wealthy but frugal man and these few pieces of sturdy oak furniture lasted him a lifetime. He looked forward to passing it down to his own son with pride, only to have it rot in our basement for the next twenty-five years. My mother hated it. By the time she inherited it, we were at capacity in crappy dressers and bookshelves, so the basement it was.

  Monica traverses an obstacle course of cleaning supplies as she makes her way deeper into the bowels of my old home. I wander to the dresser and give it my own pat-down as if greeting an old friend. I grip the ends and give it a shake as if offering up a hug and something jostles from up above—the thin edge of a piece of paper and I snap it down to find a thick envelope with my aunt’s name, Jolene, written in my mother’s neat handwriting across the front. Something in me loosens and I resist the urge to bawl. There she is. I’ve found her. Seeing my mother’s handwriting is almost as good as seeing her face.

  A dull thud hits the floor from across the room and I quickly tuck the envelope into the waistband of my jeans and pull my shirt over it. Whatever my mother has to say to my aunt, I want to drink down in private. Probably pages of family recipes. I’d relish to make them all. Or maybe directions to the venue of a gala she was hosting. If my mother was anything, she was old school, right down to the longitude and latitude minutia of life.

  “Everything okay?” I head over and help Monica out of the tangle of scattered work tools. When the weather got crappy, my father would tinker down here for hours. We called him the mad scientist. Rachel once corrected me when I said it and suggested he was just mad.

  “Oh hell.” Monica does a little tap dance as she falls into my arms. “Well, that’s better.” Her lashes bat up at me manically, and I openly frown at her as I lead us out of the dimly lit maze.

  “Ladies first.” I follow her up the stairwell and lead her straight through the house, turning off lights as we pass them by. The bitter cold air outside feels like a welcomed reprieve as it attempts to descale the past off my flesh with its sting. “What did you come by for, anyway?”

  She looks up, her hand finds a home over my cheek, heavy and weighted. Her skin glows against the dark expanse of nothingness behind her, and those lips look like a vortex of blood red darkness I never plan on getting sucked into again. In truth, I don’t find Monica attractive. I did once, and once was more than enough.

  “You are a beautiful man, James Brennen Price.”

  Brennen. I don’t think I’ve heard my middle name spoken out loud since the last time Monica said it. My father’s brother died just before I was born and my parents wanted to honor him in some small way. I’ve been hauling around my uncle’s ghost long before I ever did my siblings’.

  “I can’t imagine the pain you’re going through.” Tears slick her cheeks as if on cue. “You lost a lot of family in your young life.”

  I carefully remove her hand and land it at her side. “I often wonder what my family would have looked like if my brothers and sister were still here today. I imagine they’d all have families of their own by now. Lots of kids running around. But they took all those with them when they died. It’s just me. One kid—and I couldn’t keep track of her.” My voice cracks. Monica wraps her arms around me, leaping at the chance to offer me a modicum of physical comfort. Her perfume holds the scent of high school. Of all those years locked in a smothering relationship with her.

  “You have a family. You have your father. You have me.”

  I reach down in an effort to try to pry her off me and she tightens her grip. Her eyes widen as she buries them in mine. “And I think it’s time I told you about another family member you have.” She gives an audible swallow as her mouth contorts as if unable to finish the thought. “Our child.”

  Allison

  According to the laws of nature, the sun rises, the sun sets—the intervals in-between mark off seasons, months, years, decades, a lifetime. We are selected at random by the lottery of life and we mark off our years until we are selected at random by death. Or so it seems. I believe there is divine intervention behind each and every living soul. A purpose for us all, even if we never make it to the finish line. A meticulous network of preprogramed events that are meant to lead us from start to finish. My father once said that the Bible stipulated nothing was random. Then my mother took the book and knocked him over the head with it. But my father’s words stuck with me. I’ve always been prone to believe him over her. The friendly counselor over the wicked warden. Up until the day Reagan dissolved into thin air, I believed we had an ordained blessing upon us. Nothing could go wrong—with the exception of James fucking things up, but that was to be expected. He was and is a man.

  I glower out the window as the steam rises from my coffee on this lonely morning. Yesterday was Halloween. I’ve never been a fan of the spooktacular night, but with Reagan, the day, the entire week leading up to it felt like a glorious festival. In a way, Reagan was giving me back my childhood. All of the delicate beautiful pieces I was missing, she hand-fed me by way of her laughter, that charming demeanor that made you love her without even trying. She cast her spell on me the first moment I held her in my arms. I saw Len in her dark eyes. That dark head of hair everyone swore belonged to James? It was Len’s, too.

  A timid knock erupts over the door, and I bolt to it in hopes it’s Reagan herself.

  But it’s not Reagan. It’s not any sane person I would crave to see at ten in the morning. It’s Heather Crazy Train Evans wagging her phone at me, pointing at it with a feral looking grin on her face.

  “Are you insane showing up here?” I hiss as I jump onto the porch and close the door behind me. “If James finds out you’re stalking me, he’ll have you arrested and booked.”

  “Maybe he’s the one who should be arrested and booked?” Her eyes bug out. She has her hair slicked back into a ponytail, showing off too much forehead. Her lips are puckered and pasty, crusting around the ridges as if the icy weather doesn’t agree with her. “I’ve got evidence that he’s not so innocent!”

  “What?” I lead her down the steps and around to the side of the house, out of earshot and out of sight. “What are you talking about?” My chest starts to pound erratically because a part of me already knows.

  “He’s a cheater, Al. He’s got a girl on the side. And I caught ’em. Me—your very best friend.” Her eyes seal over mine like a threat, that desperate wanting of approval knifing out of every pore in her body.

  My stomach bottoms out for so many reasons, but more unnerving that the thought of her catching James with some woman—which I’m not sure I believe—is hearing her decry our friendship. It’s like nails on a chalkboard, a sound I’d much rather live with than have Heather wrapped around my neck like a noose.

  “Show me.” I glare at the phone she’s cradling like an infant. Speaking of infants, I can’t stomach the fact she’d rather stay holed up with me than with her own family. It makes me uneasy, as if she’s bringing her obsession with me to a whole new level.

  “I got ’em coming and going.” Her thumbs dance frantically over the phone until a picture pops up.

  “It’s dark.” I shake my head, trying to make out the image. “What is that?”

  “Some house he went to for some late night trick-or-treating, and he was looking for a treat if you know what I mean.” She enlarges the picture and a grainy version of his parents’ home comes into view. It looks monolithic, towering into the dull gray sky like a long forgotten relic.

  “That’s his father’s house. He must have asked him to stop by. He probably needed a few things.” The way I’ve been sleeping the days away, James could have built a house and I wouldn’t have noticed.

  “Uh-huh.” She fli
ps through a few more pictures, and in each one another window is lit up with the peachy glow of secrets. “How about this?”

  She zooms in on an unfamiliar sedan parked snug behind the truck. The next picture shows a shadowy figure making its way up the porch. The next shot is tight. The frame of a woman comes in clean—heels, her hand raised to pour down its wrath on that door.

  A breath hitches in my throat. “He had a visitor. Probably a neighbor.” Dear God, let it be a neighbor.

  “Just you wait, Ally Girl.” Her breathing grows erratic as she steps in close. The next picture shows the girl entering the house with the top of my husband’s head in full view.

  She flips past a few more darkened shots of the home, the woman suspiciously missing from the front. The next shot is the two of them making their way down the porch. The picture is clearer, closer. Heather must have changed positions. Then the heartstopper. Her hand on his face. The next one with her arms wrapped around his waist.

  “Whoever she is, he’s not into this.” I can tell by his body language. But still it looks rather incriminating.

  She lets out an ear-piercing tsk. “That’s because she tuckered him out. They were in there for over an hour. I timed it.” Her eyes grow hauntingly larger as she suffocates me with her acidic leftover coffee breath. “If you don’t believe me, we can probably get the data off the pictures.”

  “I believe you.” I gently push her away until she’s at a solid arm’s length. “Let me see those again.” I pull her phone forward and scroll through the next few. “She looks familiar.”

  “Her name is Monica Percale. I followed her home, then looked up the tax records to see who owned the house.” She snaps the phone back with a prideful grin.

  That bitch Monica. Should have known.

  “You’re quite the little detective.” I frown at the neglected petunias bordering the house. “I do know her. She was the girl doing his makeup. His ex. I met her at the press conference. She has a thing for him.” My head ticks without meaning to. “But he can’t stand her. Besides, she’s not his type.” Hailey Oden and her thin, tan frame, flawless skin, shock of white teeth flash through my mind. “I know his type, and that’s not it.”