There was no answer, and Lance imagined Leah’s daddy—who was surely a large lumberjack of a man who could grab Lance by the shoulders and rip him in half—standing in the center of the office, furrowed eyebrows above eyes trained directly onto the door Lance was still standing behind. Waiting—no, hoping to hear a tiny sound, any excuse to kick the door open and destroy whoever was behind it, whoever was dumb enough to try and spend the evening with his daughter.
This day is going a lot worse than I was expecting it to. And that’s saying something.
“Boss told me to go home.” A new voice, deep with bass and fitting Lance’s imagery perfectly, sounded no more than two feet from the door Lance was still standing motionless behind. “Told me he’d made a scheduling error. Didn’t need me tonight.”
Leah, closer than she’d been before: “Why didn’t he call you? Did you have your cell phone off again? I keep telling you—”
“I had it on.” A quick, powerful retort. Leah stopped talking. “Boss said he’d forgotten until right when I showed up. He’d been in a meeting with Mr. Strang and some other folks, something about a fundraiser, he told me, and he forgot all about the scheduling error until he saw me at my post.”
There was a moment of silence before Leah ventured, “But…”
“I don’t ask questions, Leah! I do what I’m told.”
Lance heard footsteps across the hardwood, heading his direction. He held his breath and the amber light caught his eye again. He turned toward the partially opened door and walked as softly as he could across the floor toward it. Grabbed the handle and pulled gently, begging for the hinges not to whine. They didn’t, and Lance slid into the new room and closed the door softly behind him.
“So why’d you come back here, Daddy? Why aren’t you home, or out with your buddies.”
There was more silence again, and Lance didn’t like it. Leah’s daddy was thinking about something, contemplating some move he wanted to make. Lance could nearly sense it. Somehow, in some fashion, Leah’s daddy knew Lance was here.
Maybe.
“On my way out to the parking lot, Strang himself found me and asked if you were minding the shop tonight. I said you were, and he’d mentioned that he’d heard on the police scanner earlier that there’d been reports of a suspicious-looking man heading down Route 19, toward the motel.”
Though they were slightly muffled, Lance could still hear the words, and his heart stopped in his chest for a moment. He knows. He knows I’m here and he’s going to kill me. Okay, maybe he won’t kill me, but I doubt he wants to sit down and talk about things.
The paranormal and supernatural and whatever else you wanted to call the things Lance had dealt with his entire life didn’t scare him half as badly as a pissed-off human being with easy access to a loaded weapon. Especially one with an attractive daughter to protect.
“Daddy, you worry too much. Been business as usual here. And besides, I’ve got Bonnie behind the counter if I need her.”
Bonnie?
Lance hadn’t met Bonnie.
A loud sigh, clear as day, was followed by, “If I’d known you were going to pick something so girly, I’d never have told you about people naming their guns.”
Oh. Bonnie.
“It’s not girly! It’s because of Bonnie and Clyde! She was a badass!”
Silence again, and Lance looked around the room, waiting for the bedroom door to be flung open any second now and the search to commence.
He was in a bathroom. One larger than he’d expected, based on the size of the bedroom. There was a porcelain bathtub to his left with a showerhead sticking out of a crudely tiled wall like a weed. The shower curtain ran along a circular rod, half-open, swirling with a pattern of flowers and vines. A toilet to Lance’s right, and between tub and pot was a wooden vanity with a single sink. A medicine cabinet with a mirror front was mounted above the sink, and Lance again looked straight into his own reflection. There was a neatly organized arrangement of products on the countertop, and a toothbrush holder held a single brush. No boyfriend, then, I guess. And Lance wondered why this information mattered to him.
The source of the amber light that had caught Lance’s eyes was a plug-in nightlight glowing beneath a plastic cover next to the sink. Lance’s other senses kicked in and he inhaled the sweet smells of shampoos and lotions and perfume, briefly imagined Leah standing in front of this mirror and—
“Seriously, Daddy, everything’s fine here. I was just going to read a little bit until I was ready to go to bed, then I’d lock up and go watch some TV.”
Another long, pregnant pause. Lance found himself just wishing the man out there would kick the door down, try and come find him. At least then he’d know what the heck was going on out there.
Expecting some sort of demand for an explanation, or at least words of warning uttered in a threatening tone, Lance was surprised when all Leah’s daddy said was, “Leah, you’d tell me if there was something I needed to know about, right? You know I only want what’s best for you. Always have.”
Leah laughed. “Yessss, Daddy, of course I would. But you got to believe me. Things are just as boring here as they’ve ever been. You’re being paranoid.”
“I’d rather be paranoid than regretful.”
Lance had to agree with the man. And he noted how good of a liar Leah was turning out to be.
And then nobody spoke for what seemed like an eternity. Lance pressed his ear against the closed door and heard nothing. He contemplated opening the door a crack but feared the noise it might make. Finally, he heard Leah giggle and say, “Okaaaay, Daddy, now go get out of here and enjoy your night off.”
The heavy footsteps started to retreat, the bell above the door gave its jingle, and soon after that, the booming muffler was once again rattling Lance’s eardrums. It idled for a minute or two, and then the noise dissipated as Leah’s daddy, thankfully, drove away.
Still, Lance did not move. He would stay right where he was until Leah came to get him.
He turned away from the door and moved to sit on the toilet and wait, but he froze midstep. Twirled back around and faced the door, his heartbeat drumming in his ears. He saw nothing but the closed wooden door. He looked back over his shoulder, into the mirror, and saw only his reflection.
A second ago, there’d been somebody else with him in the darkened bathroom. Somebody else’s reflection looking straight at him. It’d all happened so fast that Lance hadn’t had a chance to make out much, but he was certain of two things.
The young man looking back at Lance had skin as white as milk and blackish-gray eyes like a shark that seemed to pierce Lance’s skin. Dark lips that looked swollen. The person who’d stared back from the mirror was dead, Lance was certain of that.
The second thing Lance was certain of was that the boy had been wearing a t-shirt with some sort of graphic and writing on the front. Lance closed his eyes and forced himself to think, to rebuild in his mind what he’d only briefly seen—or hadn’t seen.
He stood still in the bathroom, eyes closed tightly and his mind closed off to everything else. The graphic came to him first. It’d been a single letter, printed large in the middle of the shirt in a fancy script, words printed above and below.
The letter was a W.
And then, just like that, the words fell into their places.
WESTHAVEN FOOTBALL
8
Thirty minutes had passed and Lance had to pee, which was an ironic task to be avoiding because he was sitting on a toilet. But he didn’t dare use it. Not until he was absolutely sure he was in the clear from whatever potential there might still be of Leah’s daddy giving him a face-to-face introduction to Bonnie.
So Lance sat alone in the darkened bathroom, amber glow from the nightlight letting him see just enough to notice whether any more dead football players were hanging out with him, waiting their turn to use the john.
Lance could only assume the young man he’d briefly seen in the mirror was a Westhave
n player. There was the t-shirt, sure, but the boy had also seemed to be built like a person who’d spent more than a few afternoons in the school’s weight room, throwing around dumbbells and downing protein shakes like water. He’d been big, broad shoulders filling out the neckline of the Westhaven Football t-shirt’s fabric. But all those muscles couldn’t stop whatever had ended the young man’s life. And that was the part Lance was curious about.
Not just the cause of the boy’s death, but also why his ghost had been present. Unlike the spirit of Annabelle Winters, which had been what Lance could assume was an accurate representation of Ms. Winters at the time of her death—old, but pleasant enough and without physical wounds or oddities—the football player’s spirit had been more like a corpse. Something long dead and rotting and full of blackness. The image reminded Lance of a drowning victim, one whose body had been submerged for far too long.
The eyes… the eyes were the worst part.
Was the football player’s ghost supposed to frighten Lance? Its presence supposed to cause him to flee back to the bus station and get the heck out of Dodge? Or was it possible this young man’s ghost had been some sort of spy, doing the bidding of whatever dark and malevolent forces were obviously at play.
Neither option seemed appealing to Lance. But, neither much bothered him either, at least not in the sense his assumed-antagonist was surely hoping for. He would not flee, because where would he go? Plus, he’d done nothing of any significance worth spying on, other than sit on a closed toilet lid for half an hour after listening to his new friend’s father come within what seemed like inches of making things much worse than they needed to be.
He was rolling all these thoughts around in his head like a handful of marbles when Leah nudged open the bathroom door, stuck her head in, and said, “You are extremely patient.”
Lance looked up to her, startled. He’d been so deep in thought he’d not even heard the bedroom door open. He’d seen two ghosts in one day, which was something that had happened only one other time. Back when…
“It didn’t seem like you wanted me to meet your father, and from what I gathered, he didn’t seem too keen to meet me either. It was in the interest of both parties for me to stay put until called for. I figured he might be the type to stake the place out, peek through the windows and wait to see if you’d lied to him.”
“Well, you’re right. If he’d have seen you… well, I’m not sure what would have happened, but it wouldn’t have been good.” A pause. “For either of us. But he does trust me. He’s been long gone.”
Lance stood from his sitting position and stretched his lower back. “So why’d you keep me waiting?”
Leah shrugged. “Just being cautious, I guess. And maybe I was curious just how long you’d wait.” She gave him a grin, and Lance returned the favor by telling her he needed to pee.
“But you’ve been in a bathroom all this time!”
He shrugged. “Just being cautious, I guess.”
Leah left and closed the door, and Lance relieved himself with the level of self-consciousness reserved for every guy the first time or two he urinates with a new female companion within earshot. He was certain he sounded like a firehose open full-strength into a swimming pool. He flushed, washed his hands and dried them on his shorts. Then he opened the bathroom door and found Leah sitting on the edge of the bed. She’d turned the bedside lamp on and was staring at him intently.
“You’re the first guy I’ve ever had in my room. You should feel very privileged.”
Lance stood in the open doorway connecting the bathroom and bedroom. “It is an honor I will receive with respect and gratitude.”
“Do you always talk so weird?”
“I didn’t know I talked weird. So, yes. Probably.”
“You’re just different, that’s all.”
No kidding. “Different than what?”
“Most people I talk to.”
“Well, if you spend most of your time here, I can certainly believe that.”
The words were out of his mouth before he realized how rude they must have sounded. He blushed, his face warm with regret, and quickly stammered, “I mean … it’s just … you said the folks who come through here usually aren’t the… what I meant to say—”
She giggled, cutting him off. “Ah, so you are human. It’s good to know you can get flustered. You struck me as kind of robotic earlier.”
Lance recomposed himself, leaned against the door frame. “It doesn’t happen often. So now you should feel privileged.”
“Noted.”
The silence sat in the air before them like the last slice of pizza, waiting for somebody to make a grab for it. Lance reached first, tackling what he figured to be the elephant in the room. “So, you live here, at the motel?” He gestured to the room, the bathroom.
Leah sighed. “Yes, and it’s just as glamorous as it seems.”
Lance recalled his home (It’s not your home anymore, Lance. You’ll never go back there again. At least not for a very long time), the small two-bedroom house he’d shared with his mother his whole life. The unkempt look of the place, the flea market furniture and garage sale knickknacks. Glamorous was a word Lance knew wasn’t necessary to make someplace a good home.
He recalled the conversation he’d overheard earlier, when Leah had been fibbing to her daddy. “But your father doesn’t live here?”
“You think we’d be sitting here if he did?” And that was all she had to say on the topic.
Lance shrugged. “Doesn’t look so bad to me.”
“Yeah. It’ll do for now. One day I’ll get a better place. One day I’ll leave this whole town. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.”
Lance wanted to tell her he’d just done exactly what she was longing for, left his hometown behind in a cloud of bus fumes, but that wasn’t something he was ready to talk about. It was something he might never be able to talk about. So, he moved on. “Before you sequestered me in your bedroom, you were about to tell me what else was bothering you about the football team. You said there was more to it?”
“See, that’s what I’m talking about! Who says ‘sequestered’?”
Lance thought for a second. “People who know its definition and can intelligently use it in a sentence, like they do with most words?”
Leah looked at him for a long moment, as if unsure if he was kidding or being mean. Way to go, Lance. You’re a real winner with these one-liners.
“Are you hungry?” Leah asked.
The change of conversation was drastic, but by no means unwelcome. “Famished.”
Leah jumped from the bed and headed back into the motel’s office. “I’ll order a pizza. I’ll tell you what I know once it gets here.”
Lance watched as Leah picked up the desk phone at the check-in counter and placed an order, not bothering to ask him what his preferred pizza toppings were. She ordered a single large with grilled chicken, green peppers, and mushrooms. Lance was impressed with the selection, though he might have added some pineapple. Leah hung up the phone and looked at him as he made his way back to the couch. “That okay with you?” she asked.
“Sounds great. I’m not too picky with my pizza.”
Leah nodded. “I figured as much.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Guy as big as you, and as lean … I didn’t figure you’d find much to complain about with pizza toppings. Or any food, for that matter.”
Lance remembered his breakfast. Remembered Margie’s laugh after he’d ordered his slice of pie to wash down the rest of his meal. The thought of pie caused the image of his mother’s face to jump to the front of his mind, half-hidden behind her mug of tea, steam curling around the edges of her brow as she listened intently to anything he’d ever had to say to her at the kitchen table.
“Hey, you okay?” Leah’s voice snapped him back to the present.
He shook his head to clear it, the dull pain at the back of his head having throttled down to only a mi
nor ache. His vision readjusted to the girl before him, this nice young woman who’d been able to sense in him some sort of genuineness—the way he’d been able to sense it in her—and allow this near-instant friendship to mature so rapidly. And, allowing himself one last glance back to the memory of his mother’s face, Lance thought to himself, Mom would like her.
“Yeah, sorry. I just.…”
“You spaced out on me. Am I boring you already?”
Lance smiled. “No. No, you’re not.”
They sat on the couch together while they waited for the pizza, Lance constantly glancing in the direction of the windows and straining his ears to pick up the noise of a rumbling muffler headed back their direction. Leah turned on the television and they watched a rerun of The Big Bang Theory, both of them happy to have the show’s laugh track fill the silence of the room. Lance knew they were both growing more comfortable around each other, but the white noise definitely helped to make things a little less awkward.
The sound of a small, whining engine in the parking lot was quickly followed by three quick knocks on the office door. Lance jumped in his seat at the noise, still on edge with the threat of Leah’s father’s wrath, but Leah calmly stood from her curled position on the couch and said, “It’s just Brian with the pizza.”
Lance stood anyway, ready to make a run for it, or at least be able to defend himself, if Leah was mistaken. But when she opened the door, Lance only saw the face of a young man dressed in baggy jeans and a pizza shop polo standing on the sidewalk. Leah greeted him and they exchanged common pleasantries, handed him some cash she’d pulled from her pocket, took the pizza, said goodnight, and then closed the door. “I went to school with him. He was a year older, but we had some of the same friends.”
“Didn’t seem too talkative,” Lance said.
“You probably made him nervous.”
Leah sat back down on the couch and set the pizza box on the cushion between them. She opened it and took a slice for herself and began watching TV again. Lance devoured four slices in the time she’d eaten two and declined any more when she asked. She closed the box and then went behind the check-in counter, bending down and reappearing with two bottles of water. “All I keep in the mini-fridge is water, so I hope you’re not a soda addict.”
Lance Brody Omnibus Page 13