Housewarming

by Jennifer Bowen

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  “The girl could still be inside for all we know,” Jane’s tone was neutral, not a hint of what had just happened detected. She appeared oblivious to her soaked shirt.

  Tom scratched his head, knowing the woman beside him had nearly drowned (where the water had come from, he would have to think about later), but pushed it aside. He made his decision. “Shannon, go inside and look under the beds, in closets, inside cabinets, wherever. There’s a good chance she never went outside. She knows you. She’ll come to you.”

  But Shannon’s mind was on the authorities. They had made such a commotion that even here on the outskirts of town, someone could’ve heard something out of the ordinary and made a fateful phone call. “What if the cops show up?”

  His eyes were blazing as he spun around. “We need to hope no one heard anything and play this out. There’s nothing else we can do. We need to fight while we still can.”

  “This has gone so totally wrong,” Shannon said in a small voice.

  “You started this and now we have to finish it,” Tom said, softly. “You didn’t think this through, Shannon. It’s a mess.”

  “But we had to do something. They were living in our dream home.”

  “It wouldn’t have been our dream home anyway.”

  “What do you mean? We still can live here. There’s a chance.”

  He shook his head, looking down at her with sympathy. “That was never the plan. It’s been over for a long time. We’re done. I was going to break up with you months ago before all this started.”

  “What?”

  Jane barged in, saying, “I’m gonna go look for these brats out here.”

  Tom grabbed Jane’s arm and said to Shannon, “Just find the girl.”

  “What do you mean, you were going to break up with me?” Shannon asked, alarmed. “When? After you helped the Tamesons fix up their nice, new home? It was me that got you lined up to be in the house, to have access to it.”

  “I didn’t need you to get my house back!” he spat back, startling her.

  She scoffed, “Then what plan did you have, because you never told me anything.”

  “That’s why I didn’t tell you anything. I wasn’t going to be with you anymore!”

  The words cut her. She tried to swallow.

  “Tom, I’m going,” Jane said, annoyed with the time they were wasting.

  “Okay, go!” He relented. “Take the woods over there on the side closest to town. He’s only a kid, but he could’ve sensed it was smart to get help in town.”

  She headed off down the deck steps, disappearing into the darkness.

  Shannon asked him, finding her voice, “What was your plan then?”

  “My uncle and I were going to finish building the house and then he was going to have Jane and me live here with him. He was sick. I don’t know if you know that, but he wouldn’t have lived very long. Then Jane was gonna get the boot and it was going to be all mine. That was the plan.”

  “Why did you stay with me?”

  “You know how fast it all happened. One day I was helping him put in floors and then the next day he was telling me he had been evicted, and then the sheriff showed up and forced us off the property.” He didn’t see her anymore. He was recalling that day and the disgrace he and his uncle faced over the next month. Jimmy had stopped making payments on his building loan, had been foreclosed on a few months later, and had been evicted a few months after that, all without Tom being in the know. The bitterness of losing the property that had been in his family since the early 1800’s had not faded since the day the sheriff had flashed the eviction notice in his face, the sheet of paper his uncle had pretended didn’t exist.

  “But if it weren’t for me, you would never have been able to own the property,” Shannon told him.

  “What are you talking about? I didn’t need you to get it. I was just slow on breaking it off with you. I had other things on my mind, didn’t I?”

  “He’d never have let you live here,” she said. “You’re dense. What would your uncle, practically married to that cow, want with you living here? I don’t care that you thought he was sick or terminal or whatever. There’s no way they would’ve kept you around for more than a few weeks. Your uncle wasn’t trustworthy. He would’ve used you until the house was finished and then he would’ve shown you the door. You had no claim to the property. He would’ve married the cow and then when he died, if she didn’t have a heart attack first, she would’ve owned the house. You never would’ve gotten it. So, I did what I did for us.”

  “Becoming friends with the Tamesons wouldn’t have given us the house.”

  “Your uncle died before the Tamesons moved in. Remember?”

  Tom’s eyes flickered. Not more than six months ago, Jimmy had died. He had padded his lawn mowing business with some extra contracting work as a painter. He’d been at one of his jobs, painting the exterior siding of a commercial building when a sudden heart attack had sent him falling off scaffolding and onto the parking lot below.

  “So what?”

  “So, let’s just say I knew he had a weak heart and I loosened some screws on the scaffolding…If we had been quicker, we could’ve bought the house back.”

  He was trying to understand. “Are you saying you made it so the scaffolding would fall apart?”

  She drew her lips back, exposing brilliant white teeth. She looked inhuman, her cruelty illuminated by the single deck light. “I just hoped the fall to the ground would’ve broken his neck, killing him in a freak work accident. The heart attack made it all neat and tidy.”

  He hated her in that moment. There was no turning back to how he had felt about her a year ago. Back then, he thought they would’ve been married by now. “You’re telling me you killed my Uncle Jimmy? The man who raised me? My only family in this world. You did that?”

  She nodded, stepping close to him. She smiled tenderly, thinking this was her saving grace. Surely, he’d fall back in love with her again for what she’d done for them. She had removed the unneeded uncle and was well on her way to removing the Tamesons. The plan was getting back on track. They’d dispose of a few people—somehow—and then they’d be living here in their dream home just like they had planned all along.

  He stepped back, his face distorting with rage. He was raising his clenched fist when a powerful blow knocked him down to the deck floor. A quick, whip-like crack thundered in the night.

  Chapter Forty

  Tom looked down at his chest and then at his legs. He was covered in blood, but he didn’t feel pain. He was numb.

  I’ve been shot! he thought wildly.

  Lying on his back, he reached down to touch his thigh. He pulled his hand back and looked at it, seeing his fingertips were red. It was blood. But why couldn’t he feel any pain? Was he in shock?

  Who had shot him? Had Shannon been holding a gun?

  “I hate you!” someone screamed.

  He jerked up his head and upper back to find Jane on the deck, holding his gun. He scrambled to his butt and bent his blood-smeared legs, scooting back. He saw with horror that Shannon lay on her back, her arms and legs slightly bent from the fall, but mostly due to the impact of the lone bullet that had struck her chest.

  He looked down at his legs and wiggled them. He patted his hands over them and his chest, realizing he hadn’t been shot. It wasn’t his blood.

  It was Shannon’s.

  He stood up on wobbly legs.

  Jane wasn’t looking at him. She kicked Shannon hard in the side. “Are you dead?” Jane asked, sardonically.

  “What did you do?” Tom scooted to where his girlfriend lay and looked down at her unblinking eyes that stared at the night sky, then at the bloody sweat jacket that covered her. “You killed Shannon?”

  The wind whipped Jane’s hair around, her distorted face a beacon in the midst of a hurricane. She spat, “She killed Jimmy. I heard her confess it. I loved him more than anything.” She looked at him cold
ly. “Why did you stay with her for so long?”

  “I don’t know. I should’ve ended it a long time ago.”

  “Yeah, you really should have.”

  He didn’t have time to react. Jane raised the gun and pointed it at him, firing; a second shot clipped through the night.

  As the third bang shot through the cold darkness, this one self-inflicted, sirens rose from the depths down the road. A boy and his younger sister, spotted on Seter Lane moments before, had alerted a driver who had been pulling up to his farmhouse.

  The Tamesons’ front yard was suddenly bright, flooded with blazing white floodlights.

  Epilogue

  Normally, an overcast October day would have made Kara lethargic. She wouldn’t have wanted to get out of bed. But that day, she didn’t notice the gray clouds that had gathered in the sky, blocking out the sun, nor the chilly air that added to the bleakness. Today was a happy day. At least that was what she had decided it would be.

  She turned her back on the house at 110 Seter Lane and, taking Lilah’s hand in hers, walked cautiously down the porch steps. Her sleep had improved (she hadn’t had any nightmares anyway), but she still hadn’t slept through the night. None of them had been sleeping very well in the hotel room they’d been staying in over the last week. The soreness from the hard, ultra-thin mattress hadn’t done Kara’s bruised body any favors.

  “Mommy, will we have a big yard?” Lilah asked, letting go of Kara so she could clutch onto the statue with both hands.

  “Big enough,” Kara replied, following Lilah down the stepping stones that led them through the grass. Truthfully, she didn’t think there was much lawn on the property of the apartment complex they were moving to in town. But she didn’t add to her statement.

  “Mom, can we get chicken tenders for lunch?” Jack called from the sedan.

  “Yeah, that sounds good,” Kara replied. She and John had spoken with the kids very little about the horrific night, but they knew the day would come when there’d be questions. Although they didn’t press the subject, they had assured the them the bad guys were all gone.

  Well, almost.

  The police told her, and John tried to reassure her, that Matthew Foreman, the lone antagonist who had survived that night, was no threat; especially since he was tucked away in a psychiatric hospital. He had had a mental breakdown that night and apparently, hadn’t come out of it. At least, that’s what she was told. Nobody mentioned if they had reached out to Diane about her son. Kara assumed they had.

  Kara gazed across the front lawn to the lemon house, peeking from behind the fall foliage. John didn’t know she had gone over there earlier that morning. She had slipped in the screened porch and through the front door into the house, which had been, surprisingly, left unlocked. Kara had called for Diane, passing from room to room, not caring she was trespassing. Ultimately, it didn’t matter: Diane wasn’t there.

  Kara looked around, seeing two framed photographs of Diane and Marvin propped up on the fireplace mantle in the living room: one of them from a decade or so before, and the other a faded shot of them as a young couple on their wedding day.

  Kara was invading their privacy, she knew that, but the longer she was there, the more she wanted to see, wanted to know about her quirky neighbors. She returned to rooms she had breezed through earlier and even glanced into closets. She couldn’t say she gleaned any information related to Diane’s whereabouts and, really, her visit resulted in more questions than answers. Why, for example, did Marvin have more clothes than Diane hanging in the closet, and why didn’t Diane have anything in any of the bedroom dressers? Marvin’s belongings were everywhere: his slippers by the TV set in the living room, his dirty boots by the backdoor, a book on farming left open near the kitchen sink.

  Where did Diane keep her things?

  Kara didn’t stay much longer, knowing she’d stayed too long and, frankly, she was unsettled by the questions that were growing. Diane was a mystery to her and it seemed she always would be.

  Kara had packed Sophie’s memory box in cardboard marked, “Sophie” in black ink. Even though Shannon hadn’t said anything about putting the white box on her bedroom floor or moving the receiving blanket into the kitchen drawer, Kara told herself it had to have been Shannon that had done those things, because Kara couldn’t cope with the blame. She had looked one last time at the box’s contents, making sure the receiving blanket still smelled of baby powder, before packing it away. She wouldn’t pull the box out until they had moved into their permanent home. She wouldn’t keep it hidden like she had. She just needed to wait until the time was right to display it.

  As Kara approached the sedan, there was a sudden crash that made all of them jump. She spun around, looking up at the French country house with the rounded, chocolate brown shutters and the creeping brick that edged around the first-floor windows, her heart beating wildly. But nothing stirred; the curtains stayed shut, sheltering all of the windows, blocking her out.

  “Mommy!” Lilah cried.

  Kara looked down. The statue had fallen, busted into tiny pieces. Kara stood over the mess and half-expected to see some hidden treasure, perhaps a slip of paper, a note. But the statue had been hollow inside all along.

  “All set?” John called. He stood beside the rented moving truck, his hand resting on the driver’s door handle. They were all packed.

  Kara glanced up again at the house, the dream home. Her eyes scanned the trees that framed the picture-perfect house. She was glad she couldn’t see the single, stray white scarf she knew was staying behind, the one she had seen when she had tried to make her escape that night through the playroom.

  There was a mystery on the hill, one she had been hounded by in her dreams. She had some pieces of the story, or so she thought. She knew Robert Collumber and his beautiful Elizabeth had met there, just like she knew he had had a barn once at the end of the lane where the dilapidated gray structure now sat. The young couple had tried to raise their child at the fine estate in town, but all of their lives had ended in misery.

  Kara wondered at the way the wind had blown that horrible night a week ago, and thought perhaps, something otherworldly had helped her family survive, perhaps the Collumbers, but that was too fantastical to think about at present. She hadn’t told John about them, but maybe one day, far in the future, she would when the pieces made sense—if they ever made sense.

  Eventually, after the house sold, they’d start looking for another home. Maybe a dream home, maybe not. She wasn’t picky; she was looking for ordinary now.

  “We’re ready,” Kara said. She led Lilah to the car, ignoring her cries. Kara didn’t bother picking up the shattered clay pieces scattered over the stepping stones.

  *** *** ***

  Acknowledgments

  Writing fiction can be a lonely activity. Basically, it's just you and the pretend people you've made up. Plotting, however, can be a family sport.

  Thank you to Chris, Gwendolyn, and Daegan for thinking out loud with me when I've come across a plot hole, listening to me read you an excerpt for feedback, and for leaving me to my quiet workspace (i.e. make-believe world) when you've seen me typing. Your support has helped me immensely.

  Also, a special, additional thank you to Chris for the cover art, formatting guidance, and steadfast encouragement. I've spent too many years on Seter Lane and I swear (this time for real), I have moved on to writing the next novel.