by Mark Lukens
She didn’t look scared of me. She was smiling. It wasn’t like she was running away from me in fright, but more like she was hurrying toward something. Like she wanted me to follow her.
To where?
And then I saw where she was going—the house across the street. I could see it materializing out of the darkness, the little splash of light in the window. Was someone in there? Was she going to see someone inside?
I wanted her to wait for me. I wanted to call out to her, but it was like I couldn’t get my voice to work. I wanted her to stop, to talk about this. I felt there might be something bad in that back yard, something bad inside that house. I just wanted her to wait a minute.
And then I was awake.
I sat up in bed and looked down at my legs. I had a pair of jogging pants on and my sneakers were on my feet, the laces tied. I had a shirt on. The TV was off, but the ceiling fan was still on. The bathroom light was off, but from the open door of my bedroom I could tell other lights in the house were on.
Something had woken me up.
A noise?
And then I heard it, the sound of someone moving something around in another room, that person trying to be quiet.
My heart thundered in my chest as I slid out of bed. For just a second I thought it might be Michelle. Maybe she had come back home. Maybe she’d changed her mind about leaving me.
Maybe I thought that because I’d just been dreaming about her.
I didn’t have a gun. I’ve never had a gun. Michelle had never liked guns, and I’d never grown up around them. I’d never even shot a gun. But right at that moment I wished I had one. All I had was an aluminum baseball bat in my closet—the extent of my home defense.
A moment later I crept out into the hallway with the bat gripped in my hands. I felt inadequate with the bat, the person who’d brought the proverbial wrong weapon to the fight. I paused just outside my bedroom door for a moment, listening.
I didn’t hear any other noises in the house.
The next room down the hall was the office. The light above the desk was on. My computer was on. I glanced inside, but didn’t go in. I kept going down the hallway. I peeked into the “gym.” The light was off and I turned it on. The closet door was partially open, but I didn’t want to check it just yet. I wanted to check the rest of the house and then I would circle back and check all the closets.
The light was on in the kitchen. I walked through the living room and then the dining room, looking around. Our house isn’t huge, and it only took a few moments to be reasonably sure no one else was in the house with me. I went into the kitchen and glanced down at the sets of keys in the little dish next to Michelle’s purse. My dirty dishes were still on the counter, the wastebasket nearly overflowing. Everything still looked the same, but I swore I could tell someone had been in my house.
The last place to check was the garage. It was nearly empty because we hardly ever parked our cars in there.
I began to relax a little. Maybe I had dreamed the noise. I turned off the garage light and closed the door, locking it. I went to the front door to check it and found it unlocked.
I froze for just a moment. The fantasy of Michelle coming back to be with me fueled me, making me do something not so smart—I opened the door and stepped out onto the front porch. The porch light was on and I still had the baseball bat in my hands. From the splash of light from the front porch I could see most of my front yard. There were no other vehicles parked out there. The lone street light a few feet down the road provided a little more light, but the light didn’t touch the house across the street, keeping it hidden in the night shadows.
No one outside. No movement anywhere.
I waited for a few more minutes. It was hot and humid. Crickets sang their songs in the brush and moths fluttered around the porch light, their papery wings clinking against the glass globe around the lightbulb. I went back inside and shut the front door, locking it, making sure the deadbolt was locked.
Now that I had calmed down a little, I had time to think. I looked down at my shirt, pants, and sneakers. I knew I’d gone to bed in only my underwear. When had I gotten dressed? Had I gotten dressed and couldn’t remember it? Had I woken up at some time in the night and hadn’t remembered it?
The clock on the stove in the kitchen said it was 4:38. Not too far from dawn.
I kept the baseball bat with me as I checked the house again, my skin still tingling with the creeps, my mind still buzzing with fear. After I checked every possible hiding place, I set the bat down beside my bed. I went to the office and sat down in front of the computer. The monitor was a black screen with the little green light at the bottom flashing—the monitor had been on so long that sleep mode had kicked in.
After moving the mouse around a little, the screen came back to life, showing the homepage with icons. I opened up the web and checked the search history.
Nothing recent.
I checked some of the files, not really sure what I was looking for. Did I really think that someone had broken into my house and used my computer? Or was it more likely that I had forgotten to turn off my computer and lock the front door? Wasn’t it even possible that I had woken up and gotten dressed, kind of half-awake? I’d been stressed out lately. It was possible.
But I’d never sleepwalked before, not that I’d ever been aware of. And I couldn’t help thinking that someone had definitely been in my house. I couldn’t describe the feeling, but it was just something I was sure of, like I could sense another human invading my territory.
An hour later I sat on the front porch as the pre-dawn’s light illuminated the sky in the east. I could just make out the house across the street, the house I’d seen in my dream earlier, the house that Michelle had been running to. She’d wanted me to follow her. She hadn’t even been waiting up for me.
It was just a dream. That’s all. I had Michelle on my mind constantly, and other familiar objects had made their way into the dream, even if they didn’t make any sense.
That was all.
I decided that I would drink my cup of coffee and then go back and lie down in bed once the sun had come up. Maybe I would feel better as soon as it was light, like burglars wouldn’t risk a crime in the daytime.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I was able to get back to sleep for a few hours. I got up at nine o’clock, just barely awake, and then I heard someone pounding on the front door. Just from the way the person was knocking, I knew who it was. It was the same sound I’d been awakened to yesterday morning.
I was still dressed in the jogging pants and T-shirt. I slipped my socked feet into my sneakers and brushed my hair back, trying to tame it in place a little before getting to the door.
“Mr. Hughes,” Detective Hartwell said when I opened the door.
“Detectives,” I answered, opening the door wide for them to come inside before I got threatened with a search warrant again.
They entered, both of them looking around. Detective Williams seemed annoyed by the sight of my messy kitchen. “Not much time to clean up?” he asked.
I didn’t answer.
“Too busy chasing down leads?” Detective Hartwell asked.
I was sure they thought their little skit was cute, but I was too groggy to ask them what the hell they were talking about.
“We know you talked to Kendra at the nursing home,” Detective Hartwell said.
“I’m trying to find my wife.”
“Yeah, we talked to her, too. We had a pretty interesting conversation with her.”
I was sure they had.
“We also got a call from Richard Gomez. He said you were harassing a waitress named Cindy.”
“I was just asking her some questions.”
“You need to leave them alone. Leave the questioning to us.”
“You don’t seem to be doing much to find my wife,” I blurted out before I even realized what I was going to say.
The detectives stared at me, cold and hard stares.
“All you seem interested in is me. You two seem to have your minds made up that I had something to do with this. That I did something to my wife.”
“We never said that.”
“I didn’t do anything to her. Either she was taken, or she left me. I just want to find out what happened to her.”
“Well, you need to leave the policing to us.”
I nodded. “What about going to the news?”
“The news?” Detective Williams asked, crinkling his face like I’d said something disgusting.
“Yeah, the news. Should I talk to the news? Tell them that my wife is missing. See if anyone comes forward.”
“And how’s that going to look?” Detective Hartwell asked me.
I got his drift right then and there. The reporters weren’t going to stop with me. They would interview Kendra, hear her story about how Michelle was scared of me, how she had found a way to escape an abusive husband. The news would find the story it wanted to tell, spinning it the way they wanted. Yeah, the news was definitely out of the question for now.
“We just wanted to come by and tell you to back off with the amateur police work.”
I was about to tell him he could have just called me, but I didn’t say anything. I was sure they wanted to come by in person so they could have another warrantless look around.
“I just want to find her,” I said. I sounded defeated, beat down.
“We’re doing everything we can,” Detective Hartwell said with no real emotion.
Finally, they left. I closed the door and locked it. I was still drowsy, like I hadn’t slept well.
I wondered if I should start looking up attorneys, get one lined up. I realized I was trembling. I wondered if I’d been trembling when the detectives were there.
*
I cleaned the place up a little, doing the dishes, emptying the trash. I put Michelle’s books back on the bookshelf. I might not have put them back in the right places, and there seemed to be more books than what I had taken down, but I didn’t think Michelle was really ever going to know or care. I shoved some books on top of others, wedging them in place.
It felt good to clean up. I’d never been OCD, but I’d also never been a slob. I used to get made fun of at work because I kept the inside of my lawn truck so neat. I hated it when other techs borrowed my truck and rearranged everything inside of it. I think some of them did it on purpose to bug me.
I took a shower and made some lunch. After I ate, I still felt restless, like I needed to do something. Maybe I would work in the yard this afternoon, or work out in our little gym, something to get myself tired enough to sleep tonight.
Instead I found myself looking through Michelle’s things again, certain that I had overlooked something, certain that I had missed a clue she’d left behind.
And then I found that clue inside a pair of her boots. The boots were black leather, probably came up to her knee. The heel was spikey but not terribly high. These were a pair of boots I’d never seen her wear before. I had pulled the shoes out to check under the plastic and metal racks they rested on, getting desperate in my search. One of the boots felt funny, like something was stuffed down inside of it. I reached my hand down into the boot and felt a pack of papers. I pulled out the small pack of papers held together with a few rubber bands. I sat back, staring at the papers in my hand, feeling like a treasure hunter who’d finally scored after years of ridicule.
I took the papers to the bed and turned on the overhead light, but I turned off the ceiling fan. I spread the papers out, staring at them. Some of them were bank statements, and others were notecards with a series of numbers scrawled on each one of them in pen.
I spread the notecards out—there were eleven of them. And then I spread the bank statements out, just small printouts like you’d get from an ATM. I had a brickwork of papers on my bed. I looked at each of the bank statements first because I could understand them; I didn’t know what the series of numbers on the notecards meant.
The bank statements were from a joint account that I couldn’t remember opening. I organized the statements from earliest to latest. From each statement, it seemed that money had been added to the account, never withdrawn. From the latest statement—only one month ago—I saw that the account totaled $63,629.38.
That was a lot of money. Where the hell had it come from? It seemed like Michelle had been adding money to this account over the last three years. But where had she been getting the money from? Her work? No, I saw every one of her paychecks. I did the bills each month; she always said she hated messing with the finances.
I set the bank statements aside for a moment and looked at the notecards. Each card had a series of numbers written on them. The numbers seemed random, some ten digits long on up to eighteen digits long. They didn’t seem to be dates. Maybe they were passwords to something.
I took the notecards and bank statements with me to the office. I looked up the bank’s website. There was a page to log in, but I had no idea what the username would be or the password. I typed in Michelle’s email as the user name and one of the series of numbers as the password, but it wouldn’t go through. I tried each of the eleven strings of numbers, but none of them worked. Either these weren’t passwords, or one of them was a password and the username was wrong.
I sat back, staring at the computer screen. I looked up the address of the nearest branch of the bank. There was one in Daytona Beach. I knew where it was. I would go there tomorrow, talk to the teller. Maybe I would move the money to another account, or close it. I wasn’t sure if I could close a joint account without Michelle’s signature, but I could find out.
Maybe Michelle was waiting to come and drain the account. If I could drain it first, maybe it would force her to come to me. She could have the money; I just wanted a chance to talk to her.
But then again, maybe it would look suspicious if I moved the money or closed the account. Maybe there was a way for me to be notified if Michelle tried to take some money out or move the money.
I got up and paced. The mystery seemed to be getting deeper, but I also felt better because at least I’d found something. But this wasn’t something I could tell the detectives about—it would give them even more of a reason to think I had done something to Michelle. They would never believe that I had a large amount of money in a bank account that I couldn’t remember opening.
Why couldn’t I remember opening the account?
Was there something wrong with my memory? I’d never had problems with my memory before.
Or was there a different answer? Had Michelle somehow opened the account without my being aware of it? Forged my signature somehow?
But that didn’t make sense. Why would she go to that kind of trouble? Why not just open an account in her own name? It’s like she wanted me to have access to this money. This had to have been an account that we had opened years ago, maybe one we never used for a while, and then she started dumping money into it a few years ago.
Where was she getting the money? Was she involved in something I had no idea about? Something illegal?
Questions raced through my mind like shooting stars.
*
Later that night, after taking another shower, I only dressed in my underwear. I kept the air conditioner thermostat at seventy-eight degrees so it was a little warm in the house, but I kept the ceiling fan on over the bed. I made sure my clothes and sneakers were put away in the closet. It was still pretty early, only ten o’clock, but I needed to get to sleep early because I wanted to go into work first thing in the morning to let Steve know that I needed a few days off. I could call, but I wanted to do it in person.
And after that I had some other places I wanted to go.
CHAPTER NINE
I had the dream again. It was the same dream I’d been having for the last few nights, only the dream seemed to get a little further along each time. It started like the other dreams had. I was following Michelle through the darkness. She was at least ten or fif
teen feet ahead of me, running toward the shadowy house with a light shining out through the blinds of the front window. She turned around to look at me as she ran, her dark hair whipping around in slow motion. She was smiling. Her eyes seemed to be twinkling. Her expression seemed to say: Catch up to me.
She wanted to show me something in the house across the street.
Like in the previous dreams, I wanted to catch her before she got to the house. I was scared of that house, scared of what was inside of it even though I didn’t know what it was. I tried to call out to her, but my voice didn’t seem to be working. I tried to run faster, but it felt like my leg muscles were jelly, or like some kind of invisible force was holding me back, some gigantic band around my waist I was pulling against.
Michelle was at the gate to the rotting wooden fence that surrounded the back of the property. She pushed up on the simple metal latch—there was no padlock on the gate.
Moments later I was in the back yard, running through the weeds. There was a fog all around, and I could tell something waited in that mist, a creature of some kind, something dangerous. I couldn’t see Michelle anywhere, but I saw that a back door to the home was open, a weak golden light shining out of it, the light blurry in the mist and illuminating the doorway.
I walked to the doorway. I knew the doorway would open up to the back of a storage room at the end of the covered porch. I knew that another doorway inside this room would lead into the house, into what used to be the dining room, with a kitchen just off of it. I knew there would be an archway to the living room to my left, another archway in the living room that led to a short hall, doorways for three bedrooms on that side of the house. I knew all these things even though I’d never been in this house before.
But was that true? Had I never been in there before?
I didn’t want to go inside, but Michelle was in there. I had to get to her; I had to catch her before . . .