Mystery!

by Chantelle Aimée Osman

  Her latest BFF, Bev, said she should just ignore him, and she did her best. She didn’t say anything—not to Kevin, not to her teachers, not to Mom, and certainly not to Dad, who could be a lot less friendly than his new house persona might suggest. She remained quiet, even though Kevin creeped her out. She knew that letting guys slide on that kind of thing wasn’t good in the long term, certainly not for the girls…the women…they leered at. But the thing was, she’d probably be here for the rest of the school year at most. It was easier to just ignore him and go about her daily routine, rather than make a fuss. After all, he was just looking.

  That worked for about a month. Then the day came she couldn’t ignore him. She was leaning against the lockers in the hall at school, talking to Bev, when Kevin marched straight up to her in his plaid button-down shirt, discount store jeans, and knock-off cross-trainers and, without waiting for Bev to finish her sentence, looked Jessica straight in the bosom, and said, “You wanna go with me to the Homecoming dance Friday?”

  As if.

  “No,” she replied without elaboration. She’d picked up that habit from Dad—most likely a military thing. You know, “Yes, sir. No, sir. No excuses, sir.” She’d long ago realized simply responding without explaining saved a whole lot of stress and a fair amount of lying. So, when Mom would say something like “You got in late last night,” Jessica would respond “Yes, I did.” Of if some old biddy at church said “I didn’t see you at services last Sunday,” Jessica would reply, “No, you didn’t.” Most people were taken aback by the lack of excuses and didn’t press.

  Unfortunately, Kevin wasn’t like most people, even if he was far too much like too many fourteen-year-old boys. “Why not?” he asked, his face blushing bright red.

  She could have said that she was already going with Bev and a whole group from drama club. She could have said she simply didn’t want to. She could even have made a feminist statement and told him that women always have the right to say no without any explanation. But Kevin was still staring at her chest and he gave her the willies, so she was a tad blunter than she really meant to be. “Because I’m a junior and you’re a freshman. Okay?”

  She wouldn’t have believed it possible, but Kevin’s face flushed an even deeper shade of crimson. He glared at her and he took a deep breath, as if he was about to say something, but Bev interrupted. “You heard her. She doesn’t go on dates with little boys. Go home and play with your…” Bev let the pause hang out there while everyone watching or listening in filled in the blank, “…toys.”

  Then Bev let loose an explosive laugh and Jessica saw a bunch of Kevin’s gaming friends smirking and guffawing at her putting him down. Jessica half-expected the kid to say something threatening or dramatic, like “You’ll be sorry,” but he didn’t. He simply screwed up his face and turned and walked away.

  Maybe she shouldn’t have been so candid; maybe Bev shouldn’t have been so mean. Maybe he’d only asked her out on a dare or something. Boys do that kind of thing, or so Jessica had heard. Still, she dreaded their next encounter. She was on edge all week, worried about what might happen. But then the dance came and went and she had a good time with her friends. She didn’t see Kevin there. In fact, he seemed to fade into oblivion or, at least, into the background of her life.

  Whatever had driven Kevin to ask her out, she didn’t notice him staring at her anymore; in fact, he stared at the ground more than anything else. And, when they said “hi” in passing in the neighborhood or whatever, he sounded shy, almost deferential. Maybe he’d learned his lesson; maybe he was okay, after all. Her unease about Kevin didn’t disappear entirely, but it dialed down to a low background hum…the kind of thing you don’t think about most of the time, but never really goes away.

  The new house wasn’t quite ready to be featured on the cover of Home Beautiful, but the cleanup continued, though at a slower pace now that Dad was commuting to the base outside of town most days. The stuff in the yard had been carried off and the lawn was mowed once a week without fail. Sure, it was a mix of weeds, grass, and clover, with way too many dandelions mixed in, but it was trimmed short, which helped a lot. The garage still had too many old construction supplies, used paint cans, and unopened bags of Weed’n’Feed to fit the car inside either bay, but Dad had filled the potholes in the driveway with dirt and gravel from a pile on far side of the garage.

  They found the bones of a dog while cleaning empty beer cans out from under the front porch. And, when Jessica helped Mom peel the garish brocade wallpaper off the stairway to the second floor, they found a bunch of odd reddish-brown markings on the plaster wall underneath. Jessica couldn’t make out what, if anything, they had been. Someone had obviously tried to clean the stains off at some point. Mom guessed that somebody had vandalized the place—maybe well before the last tenants. The way she said it made Jessica think that Mom was trying to be reassuring. But, somehow knowing that, best case, random taggers had broken into the house to vandalize it at an unknown point in its history didn’t make Jessica sleep any better. And Jessica wasn’t sleeping that well to begin with.

  As the year progressed and the days got shorter and the nights darker, Jessica felt more and more uneasy about the house. She felt uneasy passing the clean, mocha-colored wall of family photos that now hung where the brocade wallpaper had once covered the curious markings. And, when she was sleeping or studying or changing clothes in her room, she often had a feeling that someone was watching her. Someone who wasn’t Kevin. She checked more than once, peeking out the thin slit at the edge of her new curtains, past the yellowed shade she’d kept installed as an extra layer of privacy protection. Since their “encounter,” she never saw Kevin staring out the window anymore and the battle sounds from his game console were, if anything, more muted than before, especially after dinner.

  She couldn’t put her finger on why, but her uneasiness increased after Thanksgiving, growing even worse as the winter solstice approached. She didn’t say anything to Mom or Dad—she couldn’t think of what she could say that wouldn’t make her sound paranoid. But she found herself avoiding spending any more time in her room than she absolutely had to. She did her homework on the dining room table. She stayed up late watching old Law & Order reruns with Dad instead of heading up to her room to surf social media before going to bed. She even changed clothes in the adjoining bathroom rather than her bedroom.

  But she still had to sleep there. Several times every night she would jolt awake, searching desperately for…whatever had awakened her.

  She didn’t say anything to Bev, either, not even when her BFF told her she needed to get more sleep.

  “If those bags under your eyes get any bigger, the checkout lady at the grocery store is never going to ask you ‘Paper or plastic?’ again,” Bev laughed.

  “Fine,” said Jessica. “I think my mom has some Olay I can try.”

  “They say hemorrhoid cream works, too.”

  Jessica made a face. “Yuck. I’ll stick with face cream, thank you very much.”

  “Just sayin’.”

  “Changing the subject now. What do you know about the family who lived in our house before?”

  Bev thought about it. “I think that was the Kozlowski place. Kind of a dingy, middle-aged guy—always seemed kind of greasy and dirty. Worked construction or auto repair or something blue collar, I guess. Mostly he sat on porch drinking beer and yelling at the dog chained to the porch to stop barking.”

  “Sounds delightful,” drawled Jessica. “What about Mrs. Kozlowski?”

  Bev shook her head. “Wasn’t one. Divorced probably.”

  “Maybe he was single. After all, he doesn’t sound like much of a prize.”

  “Nah. Had a daughter. Crystal, I think. Older than me. She was in high school when I was in junior high, so I never really knew her.” She filed her nails for a few moments. “I’m guessing Mr. Kozlowski was a widower. Can’t imagine him getting custody of a teenage daughter unless his wife was out of the picture, espe
cially since Crystal was sickly.”

  “Sickly? How?”

  “I don’t know. Thin, pale, stringy hair. Maybe she had leukemia or was mentally challenged or secretly pregnant or cray squared bizonkers looney-tunes. All I know is she missed a lot of school right before they just up and abandoned the place a few years back.”

  Jessica sighed. “That’s not really very helpful.”

  “Helpful for what?” Bev snapped. “Why do you care?”

  Jessica shrugged. “I’m just curious.”

  Bev rolled her eyes. “Whatever. Look, if you’re so curious, why don’t you ask your boy, Kevin. He lived next door the whole time. And, you’ve obviously intimidated him into complete submission. He’d probably tell you. He’d probably do whatever you asked him to…because he lovvvvvvesssss you.”

  “Get a life,” growled Jessica.

  “You get a life,” retorted Bev. “I’m not the one obsessing about who lived in my room before I did.”

  No way Jessica was going to ask Kevin about Crystal Kozlowski. She didn’t want to do anything to upset the status quo. But now that she had Crystal’s name, it would be easy to run a few internet searches when she got home. Websites and Facebook pages have significant digital persistence. Heck, Dad sometimes got anniversary updates from guys he knew in the military who had died in combat years before—surviving relatives often weren’t as tech savvy as people who posted or they never had the interest (or the passwords) to delete old accounts.

  She started her web search right after school—in her bedroom. Mom and Dad would get too curious about what she was doing if she started looking up bizarre things sitting in the dining room. Crystal’s social media posts ended fairly abruptly about the time the Kozlowski’s suddenly moved away, so she quickly switched over to news sites. Fortunately, the local newspaper was so desperate for hits they let you browse their archives for free. She didn’t find a news story about the Kozlowski’s move—why should she?—but she did find a short blurb on the local newspaper’s police/fire blotter about a call at their address on Lindenwood.

  Suicide attempt.

  It took hours to track down more details, but she finally managed. Jessica was relieved to find the attempt was unsuccessful, but disheartened Crystal was institutionalized forty miles north. Unfortunately, the trail ended there.

  Jessica looked up from her screen and noticed it was dark. As she got up to turn on the light, a sudden sense of overwhelming dread descended over her like a shroud, making her stagger as she tried to take a few steps toward the light switch by the door. At first she was genuinely frightened, but then she thought it through. Maybe the reason she stumbled was just that she’d been sitting too long and got lightheaded from standing too quickly and not having eaten anything since the lunchroom cafeteria’s pathetic excuse for a fruit plate.

  When she turned on the light, though, she would swear she caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of her left eye, near the bathroom door. But when she turned, it vanished. She wasn’t even sure what she thought she’d seen. She tried to remember, to fix the experience in her mind, but couldn’t grasp any detail—just an amorphous gray mass receding into the corner as the light came on. Her heart pounded. She desperately wanted to scream for her parents, but resisted the urge. Sure, she was scared—cold sweat scared. But, what could she say that would make any sense to them? She felt uneasy? She thought she saw a shadow? At worst, they would think she was losing it and, if she wasn’t careful, after a few sessions with a friendly psychologist, she would wind up in a padded room next to Crystal. At best, they would pooh-pooh the whole thing, thinking she had imagined it all, that she wasn’t as nearly grown up as she thought she was.

  Instead, she said nothing, heading downstairs and sullenly picking at her food and watching TV until bedtime. By then she’d almost convinced herself that she had imagined it all, that she had scared herself with her obsessive research session about a sad and lonely mental patient. Then, she opened the door to her bedroom, and a wave of despair and melancholy crashed down on her like a tsunami on a nuclear power plant and, like it, she melted down. She headed straight to her bed, not bothering to get undressed, and crawled under the covers without turning off the lights. She lay there, shivering despite the heavy blanket and new bedspread, searching the corners of the room for the dark shadow. It took her almost two hours to fall asleep. Just as her eyelids would droop down as she began to doze off, a sudden movement out of the corner of her eye would shock her awake. The sense of dread she felt would spike with her heart rate, but when she looked about to catch the cause of her fright, all would appear well. She heard no noise except the gentle murmur of the attic fan, the background burble of the TV downstairs, and a gentle rat-tat-tat of gunfire and muffled explosions from yet another of Kevin’s lonely video game sessions.

  In the morning, the feeling of unease was gone, but she was exhausted as she stumbled to the bathroom and changed out of her wrinkled clothes into fresh ones for school. The bags under her eyes in the bathroom mirror were so heavy she snuck into the master bath while Mom made breakfast and “borrowed” her anti-aging cream.

  There was one more thing she had to do before school

  She checked out the website of Mercy Mental Health, then picked up her cell phone and dialed the number for the main desk, to see if she could visit Crystal. She had to find out what had happened. She needed to know whether Crystal had experienced what she was experiencing, and, if so, what she believed caused it. Maybe she could tell her parents she was going to the mall and Bev could drive her up after school.

  The receptionist wasn’t exactly helpful, but after a few minutes of wrangling Jessica finally found out that “Crystal is no longer a patient at this facility.” Cured? Moved? Dead? The receptionist wouldn’t answer any of her questions.

  Dead end.

  She gave up her quest for now. Friday might be the best school day, but it was still a school day. Mom and Dad were leaving tonight for a funeral—one of Dad’s Army buddies—in Colorado Springs tomorrow. She’d have the whole weekend to research online or around the area, if she needed it, completely undisturbed.

  The first thing Jessica did when she got home from school was to whip through her homework assignments. Once she got into her detective work, she didn’t want any distractions. The bad news was that Kevin was blowing up monsters next door, with the volume just a bit louder than usual; the good news was that she had the house to herself, so she left her bedroom window open and went downstairs and worked at the dining room table.

  Apparently her Google-fu needed some work. None of the Crystal Kozlowskis she found was the one she was looking for, but when she widened the search to last name only, she got over five million hits. Limiting those to hits which also included the word “California” helped, but she still was sifting through hundreds of thousands of possibilities. She was even more distressed to find out than when she removed “California” from the search and inserted “suicide” just as a guess, she wound up with even more posts—tragic and depressing posts—to plow through.

  By midnight, she gave up. She shut her laptop, leaving it on the dining room table, then trudged up the stairs and down the long hall to her room. She thought about sleeping on the couch downstairs or even crawling into her parents’ bed, but she wasn’t a little kid anymore.

  She got into her own bed, rationalizing leaving the lights on because she wouldn’t be able to see any visiting shadow clearly if the room was too dark. She regretted the decision less than thirty seconds later, when the lights momentarily dimmed.

  “Gaslight,” she murmured. It was something Mom and Dad always said when that kind of thing happened; she thought it was from an old movie or something—some kind of inside joke. She wasn’t laughing, though. Sure, this house’s wiring was old and the lights often dimmed for a second when Mom turned on the dishwasher or the vacuum cleaner, but Mom wasn’t home to do that. Jessica was all alone.

  She’d almost convinced herself
that the voltage drop in the lights was due to squirrels or birds on the electrical lines that ran through the neighborhood when the unwanted but familiar sense of dread she’d sensed before began to creep over her. She tried to tell herself that it was all in her mind, that she was just scaring herself like when she’d first seen Jurassic Park as a kid and kept peeking around the corners to see if a bevy of velociraptors was about to jump on her and eat her face. But, it didn’t work. The more she lay in bed, the more anxious she became and the more her eyes searched out the corners of her room and her ears sought out any creak or footfall. All she heard, though, was the staccato noises of Kevin’s video game, still going strong in the middle of the night.

  The sound of an explosion from across the way coincided with a dark shape accelerating toward her from the corner of the room.

  She screamed and shut her eyes tight.

  Then she heard a voice yelling “Jessica! Jessica!”

  She screamed again and kept on screaming.

  When she finally stopped, she half-opened one eye, but saw nothing. She took a few deep breaths in an effort to calm down, when suddenly she heard a crash downstairs and heavy steps on the stairs.

  She screamed again, fighting the urge to hide under the covers. Instead, as the ominous footsteps pounded down the hall toward her, she struggled to get untangled from the sheets and the much too heavy blanket and bedspread to get to her bedroom door and lock it. But as she did, it burst open, a shadow moving from the darkness of the hallway into the full light of her bedroom.