The Flip (An Angel Hill novel)

by C. Dennis Moore

  “I found you,” he repeated. “You’re mine. This is mine.”

  He rolled the picture loosely to keep the front from being seen, then turned out the light, locked the door behind him, and got back in his car.

  The other two pictures, the clock/house, and the butterfly girl, lay on the passenger seat. He took them with him every time he left the house now, to keep his parents or his sister from finding them.

  She had told him in his dream where to find it, and he’d listened and let his faith in her guide him. He felt certain this was the last one, and it would have to be enough to lead him to her. He had her name, finally, and a year. It was a start.

  Brian got off work that morning and drove to Angel Hill. He wanted to call Mike and find out what time the workers were supposed to be at the house. He needed to get some sleep. But he still hadn’t gotten around to replacing his phone yet. He wondered if maybe he should do that first, but pulling away from work, he could feel his eyelids getting heavier. He couldn’t waste time, he needed to get some sleep while he still could. Even if he only got an hour before Kevin and his crew showed up and Brian snuck out the back, he needed sleep. He could try to remember to get a new phone later.

  But when he drove past the house and just after 7:30, he saw the trucks were already parked outside.

  “Fuck,” he said, louder than he’d meant to, causing a woman pushing a baby stroller and walking a dog around the park to look over at him. He saw her, made eye contact, then looked away again, dismissing her.

  Now what, he wondered.

  He let out a heavy breath, then pulled away. He knew where he was going, but he also knew it was a waste of time. His eyelids kept drooping, though, and he had to get somewhere soon before he ran off the road, or worse, ran someone else off it.

  He grabbed a random CD out of the folder he kept on the seat, slid it into the CD player and cranked the volume. Dream Theater, he realized. Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence. That should keep him up long enough, he hoped.

  The drive seemed to take forever, but eventually he pulled up outside his house, just staring at it. He watched the front door, expecting any second to see it slowly creak open, then his mother, rotten and smelling of the grave, would come crawling out the doorway, calling to him across the yard.

  Brian! Don’t come in the house! Stay away!

  He sat there for another minute before putting the car in drive and pulling away again. There was only one other option he could think of. So he drove, trying to keep himself awake by bobbing his head to the music, focusing on that instead of how long he’d been awake, instead of how heavy last night had been, with the job change taking longer than it should because the chain on the hoist jammed up and, since it did it in the middle of lifting a three hundred pound spool of wire, he’d needed to track down a forklift driver to help him. His feet felt like he’d been on them for twenty-four straight hours. The muscles in his lower back were so tight he felt they might snap under the strain.

  “Christ, I gotta lie down,” he muttered.

  He found what he was looking for, a 24-hour motel on The Slant. He pulled into the parking lot and stumbled into the office, asking if there were any vacancies.

  “We’ve got a couple,” the girl behind the counter said. She looked familiar and Brian wondered if he knew her. He filled out a form she’d handed him, along with his debit card, and she gave him the key and told him how to get to his room.

  Brian thanked her, then parked his car near the end of the row of rooms and got the door unlocked, locked it again after he went inside, then lay on the bed without bothering even to kick off his boots.

  He was asleep nearly as soon as his head hit the pillow.

  He slept most of the day, waking up around five from a dream in which his mother slogged after him on her stomach, dragging her dead legs behind her like rotten sticks. Except this wasn’t his house, this was the house on Irving, and he kept getting lost, because everything was different and he found himself, in the dream, mad at Mike for changing all of the plans they’d made for the place without bothering to tell anyone else, so now the house seemed like a maze, with doors they led nowhere, stairs that disappeared into walls and rooms within rooms. And no matter where he turned, he couldn’t find the door.

  He woke up panting, sweating, and leaping off the bed to flip on the light and make sure he was alone in the room.

  Chapter Six

  Kevin measured the rooms, while Mike watched, but he’d only measured once and Mike hadn’t seen the figures. He wondered if the numbers would be the same were Kevin to measure again.

  The kitchen and bathroom had been gutted and the dumpster out front was slowly filling up with the debris. Mike had run people off twice already when they’d tried to climb inside. Christ, he thought after the second one, there’s nothing in there but junk, how about getting a fucking job, you lowlifes!?

  “That happens all the time,” Kevin said when Mike came in from running off his second dumpster diver of the day.

  “What the hell do they want?”

  “The metal, mostly. Copper if they can find it. They’ll take whatever bits of wire you get rid of. You threw the old kitchen sink away?”

  Mike nodded.

  “It won’t be there when they take that dumpster away, I promise. There’s gonna be a lot less in there than what you put in when it leaves here.”

  “That’s nuts.”

  Kevin shrugged. “People get money for all kinds of stuff when they find a house being reno’d.”

  Mike shook his head, then looked up as Brian walked in.

  “What’s up, man?” he said.

  Brian nodded hello and closed the door. “Just seeing what’s up here,” he said.

  Mike looked around, indicating the dust in the air, and said, “Making money, hopefully.”

  “Cool. We still doing it like we said?”

  “Of course,” Mike said. “You wanna see what we’ve got done so far?”

  “Yeah.”

  Mike showed him the barren area that used to be the kitchen.

  “They’re getting ready to take this wall out,” he said, pointing to the wall that used to separate the bathroom from the kitchen. “You here to help?”

  “Show me what to do,” Brian said.

  Kevin led Brian to the tools, handed him a sledgehammer and said, “Here you go.”

  Together Mike and Brian knocked out the wall in ten minutes, then one of Kevin’s guys, Ed, Mike thought, he was the short one, came in to take out the framing. They all helped carry the trash to the dumpster, then came back in to look at the space.

  “God,” Brian said, “it’s amazing how much bigger it seems now.”

  “You’re missing a whole room here,” Kevin said.

  “Yeah, but just a bathroom, and not a big one at all. But it really opens up this whole space.”

  “Moving the bathroom to that smaller bedroom is gonna be the right choice for sure, you watch,” Mike said, proud of himself for this entire venture. This is going to be a money making machine, he thought, staring at the newly enlarged kitchen. He was envisioning high end appliances, expensive backsplash tiles, new granite countertops with tons of storage above and below.

  “That was fun,” Brian said. “What else can we knock down?”

  “Well, while we’ve got the dumpster,” Kevin said, “I’d like to get this basement at least demo’d and start on the framing. Now I know we’ve talked a couple times,” he was looking at Mike, “about just what we’re doing down there, but if we can at least figure out which walls are coming down, we should do that much at least.”

  “No problem,” Mike said. “Let’s go take a look and figure it out.”

  Kevin and Brian followed him to the basement.

  “How long have you been doing this kind of work?” Brian asked Kevin when they got to the basement.

  Kevin shrugged and said, “Bout as long as I can remember. I was certified as a plumber, and did that for a few years, but
the longer you do work like this, the more of it you pick up. You meet people, you work with them enough and pretty soon you know who can do what. So when the guy you’re working for wants you to charge older people more than you think the job is worth and you don’t want any part of that, well it doesn’t take long to put together your own crew. We’re not here to screw anybody over, we charge an honest price for the work and we do it right.”

  “Was this the guy who gave you my number,” Mike asked, “the one who wanted you to overcharge?”

  Kevin nodded. “We had a run a few months back, down on Vesey, about four houses in a row had bad foundations and they wanted us to come in and repair it all. These are older people, you know, they don’t have a lot of money. And we know how to do that job, we know what it takes. It’s not cheap, but there’s no reason to charge people twice what you know the job can be done for. My mother, she’s up there in years, too, and how would I like it if someone came in to keep her house from collapsing and then tried to charge her so much she couldn’t pay rent or keep the lights?”

  “That’s a good point,” Brian said.

  “So I told him, I says I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job or run your company or anything, but I can’t be a part of that.”

  “So you left and got your own guys together?”

  “More or less,” Kevin said. “Like I said, we’re not out to screw anyone over, we just want to do honest work and charge a decent price.”

  “You from Angel Hill?” Brian asked.

  Kevin nodded. “I was born here, but then after high school I joined the Navy and eventually wound up living out in California for a lot of years.”

  “And you chose to move back here?” Mike asked, incredulous.

  “After my third wife and I got divorced, and she took half my land, my house, I lost my car, I just said why not, and moved back here where my family is.”

  “How long ago was that?” Brian asked.

  “Bout three years ago. When I got back to town, the first job we had was on this house right over here on 4th.”

  “I know that house,” Mike said. “You worked on that house?”

  “Well, I was supposed to,” Kevin said. “Place had burned up pretty good. We got in there for a day, but after that, nobody wanted to go back. It was weird. You know, around here you hear stories and stuff, but hearing stories is nothing, you hear stories anywhere you go.”

  “Freaky stuff in there?” Mike asked. “I always wanted to see the inside, especially after I heard they got it fixed up.”

  “I haven’t seen it,” Kevin said. “Don’t need to or want to. I was in there a few hours that day, and that was enough. Like I was saying, you hear stories. But when you’re in that house, you can feel it, like someone standing right next to you the whole time you’re in there, everybody felt it. I don’t know how many people died in there, but I know there had to be some, they were there, you couldn’t deny it.”

  “Did you see anything, or did they do anything?”

  “Nope. You just felt em. Right next to you, like they were close enough to feel em breathing on you, and it felt like they were just watching you, just staring at you. Wherever we went in that house, it was there. Gave us the chills, man, soon as we left that first day, none of us went back again. I heard they finally got a crew in there, but I’m glad it wasn’t me or my guys. A place like that, I think if you’re there too long, when you leave you take a piece of it with you. And I think that’s what it wanted, whatever was there, it wanted to go with us. Too long in that one house, it wanted to branch out.”

  “You can’t know something like that,” Brian said. He was thinking of his mother and the last time he’d seen her, which was much later than what should have been the last time he saw her. He wondered if she ever made it out of the bedroom.

  He hadn’t been back. He’d bought some new clothes, a few pairs of pants and a handful of shirts. He wore his uniforms to work, then showered in the locker room, changed, and, more often than not, came back here to sleep for a few hours.

  The guys didn’t know, but he didn’t know if he could tell them anyway. He wasn’t sure what he’d seen had been real, but it had felt real enough in that moment that he couldn’t let go of it, and he couldn’t go back there to find out for sure. It was just safer, he thought, to stay away. But now his temporary refuge had been compromised. He needed to think of something else.

  Kevin shrugged in response to Brian’s comment and Mike said, “You didn’t feel anything like that when you came in here, did you?”

  Kevin laughed and said, “I hope not. Nobody died here, did they?”

  “Not that I was told,” Mike said, “but I did wonder once. Then I figured if they had, the realtor would have had to tell us. It’s the law, right? So I’m trusting her. But I never felt anything like that here, anyway.”

  Brian thought about his first night here and what he’d thought had been outside the bathroom door, waiting in the dark. He tried to recall that feeling of standing inside the door, waiting to open it, knowing he would have to, but desperate to remain in the safety of that tiny bathroom a little longer.

  She didn’t follow me here, he thought. She’s still at the house, on the floor in her bedroom. He had to tell himself that, because if she could have gotten out, she could be anywhere. She could be in the dark behind his machine at work. She could be in the back seat on his late night drive to St. Joe. He could look into the mirror as a car came up behind him and see her silhouette there against the window.

  She could be back in the motel room he’d rented earlier, waiting for him to come back, exhausted and weak. She could be any of those places, and more, so he told himself over and over that she hadn’t been able to get out, and that was what he chose to believe.

  Kevin was talking, but Brian had missed part of it. He heard the words “can’t take” but missed what came before and after, so he focused in just as Mike was replying.

  “Can we take them down if we put up the new walls first? We want to make these two rooms into three, guest bedroom, office, bathroom.”

  He told Kevin the full extent of their plans for the basement while Kevin nodded and said, “Yeah, we can do it, I just wanted to make sure you knew we had to have something up there for support. The way your joists are running--”

  “Right,” Mike said, “we need the walls going across them. But we won’t be able to tear this wall out until we’ve got the new ones up.”

  “We can bring them down,” Kevin said, “but we’ll need to leave the frames up. But the plaster and lath can come down. In fact, you probably want to get rid of it while the dumpster’s still here.”

  “Definitely.”

  “Okay, I’ll get someone on it, unless you guys want to do it.”

  “Actually,” Brian said, “I couldn’t stay long anyway, I just wanted to stop by, but I’ll be back. It was nice meeting you,”

  He shook Kevin’s hand and Mike said, “You alright?”

  “Yeah, I just didn’t get a lot of sleep, and I need to go pick up a new phone.”

  “About time,” Mike said.

  “No kidding. My work schedule sucks sometimes.”

  “I don’t know how you do it, I couldn’t.”

  Brian shrugged. “Just used to it.”

  “How you doing otherwise? With the, you know.”

  “I’m dealing with it,” he said. “Always will be, I guess.”

  “Yeah. Well, let me know if you get a new number or if you get to keep the old one. Text me and let me know.”

  “I won’t have any of the old numbers,” Brian said. “Old one is long gone.”

  “Der, right. Okay, just come by later or tomorrow or something and you can copy whatever ones I have out of mine.”

  “Cool.”

  Brian went upstairs and Mike heard him clomp across the floor overhead, then out the door.

  “So, just like upstairs,” he asked Kevin.

  “Knock it out and pile it up,” Kev
in said. “Then the fun part comes, we get to move it all outside. Cleanup is the worst part of demo.”

  “I believe it. Okay, I’ll let you know when I’m done and you can tell me what’s next.”

  “Watch out for any electrical boxes, and leave the frame,” Kevin said.

  “Will do.”

  Kevin nodded and went back upstairs to check on the progress up there. Mike followed him to grab a sledgehammer, then went back down.

  They were only tearing down one wall, but all of the plaster and lath on the other walls would be coming down, the walls reinsulated and covered in sheetrock, so he still had all of the other walls to demo. But he started on the center wall anyway; he wanted to see how big the area was without this wall, even if they were just going to divide it up even smaller anyway.

  He swung the sledge and knocked a huge crack in the plaster, dust flying and bits of white spinning across the floor. He swung again and the crack grew. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t broken clear through it yet. Another swing and he got the head of the hammer embedded in the plaster. He tried to pull it back, but it was lodged in there pretty tight. He yanked a few times, trying to work it free, then gave a final tug and it came free, only for Mike to see a wave of dark, oil-like sludge oozing out of the hole.

  “Fuck,” he said. “I knew God hated me. What the fuck is this?”

  He set the hammer down and pried the plaster away with his fingers. Whatever was behind there, he’d done a number on it; the oil or whatever was gushing now.

  “Fucking broke through a pipe on my first try,” he muttered. “Brilliant.”

  Probably a sewer line, he thought, and pretty soon the stink is gonna hit me. He yanked away more plaster, hoping to find the source and see if he could stuff it with anything to keep it from spilling old shit and piss all over the basement. Then he thought, The bathroom wasn’t on this side of the house, the sewer lines are out there, meaning in what was going to be the rec room. There was no plumbing on this side of the house, not yet anyway. He and Ed had discussed where the lines would have to run. This wasn’t a sewer line.