Hey, you didn’t do anything, he thought. If she’d just let the natural order of things fall into place, she’d have seen the bedroom floor and that was it, it wasn’t Keith’s fault she wasn’t on board and had actually wanted to see the house.
No, but it was Keith’s fault she’d been there at all. Because he had been more interested in getting into her pants than anything else and, upon finding his “in” with her, he latched on and wasn’t going to let go until he had what he wanted.
So, yes, how things went down at the house notwithstanding, this was Keith’s fault. And he would make sure he lived up to his end of things.
He asked if he could see her and they said yes, so he went back.
She looked like shit. They hadn’t mentioned the battering her face must have taken coming down those stairs. He barely recognized her, through the swelling and the bandages.
“Jesus,” he muttered, knowing she couldn’t hear him anyway. “I’m sorry. That’s not how this was supposed to go down.”
He wanted to stay with her through the night, but once they moved her to her room, he was told visiting hours were over and he would have to come back tomorrow.
He drove home, telling himself he would set his alarm and be up early so he could get there as soon as visiting hours started.
Steven stared at the picture, imagining he could hear her voice. After many days and nights, many Google searches and countless dead ends and incorrect results, he had found her, Amy Smith, on the NWAH website, which obviously wasn’t updated very often because from what he’d been able to find, Amy Smith had died five years earlier.
The information was scant, all he knew was she’d had a stroke. He couldn’t imagine that face being anything less than happy, nothing less than a smile across it. She was beautiful. She was the girl he’d searched for his whole life, and there she was, finally, on the computer screen in front of him, and she was already five years in her grave.
He wondered what kind of person she had been. An artist, obviously, and a talented one, but aside from that. What kind of music did she listen to? The NWAH website had her listed as a librarian. He wondered what kind of books she read. What was her favorite food?
Was she the kind of woman he could watch TV with all night or did she crave adventure? He imagined she was the kind who was always on the move, always busy, full of an infectious hyperactive energy, but on those quiet nights at home alone, she would sit with him curled up on the couch for hours watching movies, just happy to be in each other’s company.
This was his idea of her, and he wondered how the reality could be any different.
Just look at her, he told himself. Look at that gleam in her eye, look at these pictures she drew, she was my soul mate.
He found it very unfair that she shouldn’t still be around, waiting for him as he’d been waiting for her.
He had framed her pictures, he felt she deserved no less, and hung them on the wall behind his computer, so he could see them both while sitting at his desk, or lying in bed.
Taped to the wall around them were a few pictures he had been able to find online. One was the NWAH staff photo, the one he currently had up on his screen, while the other two had taken some work.
Steven wasn’t a genius, but he was smarter than most of the people he knew, and he knew his way around the computer and the internet, so using what he knew about Amy Smith, where she worked when she died, he went into the website and gathered the names of people she might have known from back then, and used them as his conduits.
Well, that and a lot of patience. He’d combed through several dozen NWAH staff members--past and present--Facebook pages, scouring pictures, hoping for that one glimpse of the woman he’d come to think of as the love of his life, even though they’d never actually met.
One picture was taken at graduation, the subject smiled wide for the camera, and in the background, only her face visible over the shoulder, was Amy Smith, looking off to the person’s left, unaware she was being photographed.
Steven loved the unaffected look on her face, that serenity not put on for the cameras, but just her natural, every day look. This is how I would find her at home, he thought. I’d come in from the kitchen and find her on the couch, and this is how she would look. He found himself staring at this picture the most, lying in bed and daydreaming about a life with her.
It killed him that he couldn’t talk to her, that he couldn’t share ideas with her and hear about her day. He wanted to forward funny Tumblr posts to her so they could laugh about them together. He wanted her to hear his favorite songs and lie on the couch with her, listening to Lenny Kravtiz or Rose Chronicles until they dozed off. He wanted to take her to lunch or call her on his way to Dairy Queen and ask what she would like.
He felt like he’d missed something important in his life by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or just by not being in the right place at the right time, and it drove him crazy.
The other picture had been taken in someone’s back yard. A pool hovered in the background, a bright blob of blue over her shoulder. Amy Smith, wet hair and a black one-piece swimsuit, smiled wide for the camera while another girl with the name Rebecca Bloo stood next to her, also smiling, but paling in comparison to Amy.
Judging from the picture, it looked like it had been taken while Amy and Rebecca--whom Steven guessed had been a childhood friend--were still in high school, in one of their backyards. The caption attached to the picture read simply, “Me and Ames, pool party, BFF, Miss U lots.”
This one always made him pause, because he could tell from that smile she had no idea how soon she would be gone. Steven wanted to find her back then, protect her, stop whatever happened to her from happening and keep her safe.
He knew these thoughts were unrealistic, silly and even a little obsessive, but there was something about Amy Smith, since he first found the picture in the basement, he knew there was some kind of connection between the two, or that there should be a connection, that he should have met her, that if there had been one person in the world he had spent his life waiting for, she was it.
That’s just dumb, he sometimes told himself. You’re basing all of this on absolutely nothing. You saw a few drawings and fell totally in love with a girl you know zero about. Yeah, he liked the pictures and saw talent and passion in them, but for all Steven knew Amy Smith was a raving lunatic who yelled at her boyfriends over imagined glances just because another girl was in the room. He’d never had that experience himself, but he’d seen it from friends, had heard their war stories, and wanted no part of that.
So, sure, he could tell himself that the fantasy Amy was the true Amy and that their life together would have been perfect had they just met sooner. But he knew that wasn’t being realistic.
They would argue about what to watch on television, what to have for dinner, or Steven would come in from a long day of stocking the meat department to find Amy asleep already, and he would make too much noise opening the door or flush the toilet too loudly or decide to postpone the shower he knew he needed until morning because he was too tired, something, anything would wake her up and she wouldn’t be one of those people who woke easily, but was instead a grouchy waker, one who found something to complain about every time whether it was loud plumbing or Steven stinking of sweat.
And still there was a part of him that would have taken it. He didn’t care. He felt there was nothing he couldn’t, and wouldn’t have endured to just have the opportunity to look over and see that face sitting next to him, to have that smile he saw in the picture with Rebecca be directed at him. That was the reaction he wanted to get from someone, that they would be that happy to see him come into the room.
Amy had been that girl, he told himself. He would learn to open the door and flush the toilet as quietly as possible, he would always be clean, he would always be whatever she wanted if he could just have that chance.
The more he thought about her lately--which seemed to be constantly--the mor
e he wished there were something he could do to prove himself to her. But proving yourself to a woman five years dead wasn’t the easiest concept in the world to carry through with. The most he could hope to do, he told himself, was do right by her with the house.
She’d lived in that house, so she’d obviously loved the house--otherwise, why live there--so he would put his all into making sure the end result was worthy of her. The house would be a showcase to the love he had for her, so when he met her in the next world, he could say to her This is what I did for you.
Brian, meanwhile, was having other thoughts about the house.
He knew the plan, he knew Mike’s and Keith’s intentions with this place, to build a business and watch it develop into something that could support the four of them comfortably. But Brian’s focus lately had been his need for a place to live, a place he could go into, a place where his mother’s re-animated corpse wasn’t locked in the bedroom. In short, he had been thinking of buying the house himself.
It wouldn’t affect the business, a sale was a sale, even if one of the partners bought it; he would just forego his part of the profits and put it back into the house payment.
He couldn’t afford to keep sleeping in a motel, the Irving house was out as a temporary refuge, at least during the day, which was when he needed a place to sleep, and he wasn’t going back to his parents’ house. In fact, he had thought of maybe suggesting it as their second project.
They could take some of the money from the sale of the Irving house, which Brian wanted to buy, use it for the renovation budget on Brian’s parents’ house, and they could sell it as a company, even though technically Brian supposed he owned it now. But if the guys agreed to that, he wouldn’t have a problem splitting the money, especially if it was Angel Hill Improvement Company money that got it into shape for the most profit. Either way, he just wanted to get rid of it and let it be someone else’s problem.
Even if a crew went in and found nothing in the bedroom, even if he really had imagined it all, he didn’t care; he couldn’t go back there, he couldn’t eat in that kitchen or shower in that bathroom and pretend the house wasn’t missing two of its occupants, or that he hadn’t thought he’d seen one of them crawling across the bedroom floor to him.
And anyway, he reminded himself, his mother had screamed at him to stay out of the house. So to his way of thinking, selling the place was the best way to do that.
He’d even throw some of that money Mel’s way, he just wanted to be rid of it.
In fact, a part of him hoped the guys went in there to do their planning and did find something in the bedroom that pointed to his mother’s reanimation. Otherwise he had lost his mind weeks ago and had been living in the grip of a delusion, and that was a thought that didn’t make him feel any better at all.
He was currently driving back to Angel Hill from work, so he would call the guys after he got some sleep, when he knew they would all be up and probably at the house working. He wanted to get them all together when he brought up the idea of selling his parents’ house, present it as a business decision.
At the same time, he wanted to mention to them his plans to buy the Irving house, let them know their first venture had been a success and he wanted it--then he would be able to keep an even stricter eye on the work to make sure it was up to his standards, which he felt were very specific.
When he got back to his room, while he waited for sleep to come--which wouldn’t take long--he would try to make a mental checklist of all the things he wanted to make sure were done, his must-have list.
Mike opened the book and leafed through it. Whoever this guy was, he’d been obsessed. The book had pages and pages of pictures with notes written underneath about when said person had been inside the house last, then under that a clipping of the person’s obituary.
“Crazy much?” he asked out loud as he turned the pages.
Whoever this guy was, he’d definitely been reaching with his theory. Kenny Chen had delivered food to the house on January 3rd, 2009 and died in a car accident that same night when his car slid on the ice and was pinned between a truck and a light pole.
No shit, Mike thought. January 3rd, the guy comes to the door with the food, whoever answers knows it’s ass-chapping cold out and says come on in while I get your money, then the guy slides on ice during a Missouri winter. And that’s proof?
Or this one: two delivery men had brought a couch to the house in 2008. One died six months later of a drug overdose. The other, Mike saw, only died last month from a heart attack.
Jesus, he thought, this guy was really reaching on that one. Six years later and it’s part of a curse?
He flipped through more pages without reading them. He wondered what was missing; he saw a handful of papers fly out of the book when it went through the air.
Probably psycho med prescriptions he hadn’t filled in a long time, Mike thought.
This guy was committed, though. It looked like he had tracked every person to set foot in that place over the last seven or eight years at least, and then documented how and when they died. This had to have taken forever. But it wasn’t proof of anything sinister. How could it be? The book didn’t list the people who had been in the house and not died. So of course it was going to look like the house was a death trap.
But at the end of the day, Mike thought, it’s just a house. And this guy was obviously off his meds for way too long.
Chapter Seven
Work progressed wonderfully on the house, and by the fifth day, the plumbing for the upstairs bathroom had been moved to the new location as well as the electrical for both bathrooms. Mike had watched the progress and marveled over how good Paul was at his job. There was no way Mike could have ever learned that trade, let alone been comfortable enough doing it to undertake a project like they were doing here. The downstairs bathroom also had been roughed out and the plumbing ran down there, too. The only thing left to do now for both was install the tub upstairs, the shower surround downstairs, plus the toilets and sinks both up and downstairs.
“And nothing in the kitchen is being moved?” he asked Mike that day.
“Not the plumbing,” Mike answered. “Sink’s in the same place, we’re just adding cabinets and counter space.”
“Right,” Paul said. “It’s gonna be a long day, but we should have everything in place for the bathrooms by the end of the day.”
“No more pissing at the gas station, then?”
“Not unless you want to,” Paul agreed.
“Awesome,” Mike said. “Those places keep getting robbed. Thanks, man, for everything.”
“We’re not done yet, there’s still plenty to do.”
“Speaking of,” Mike said, “I’m gonna see what Kevin wants me working on.”
Paul nodded and disappeared into the new bathroom to get to work on his own projects.
Before finding the contractor, Mike stood in the living room and looked at how the house was coming together.
The covered porch had been constructed, the hole in the kitchen floor repaired--there hadn’t been any more rot than what was found that first day--and covered, and soon the new hardwoods would be laid in there.
They had budgeted about four weeks for completion, but Mike was thinking the work would be done well before then. He didn’t know how long the cleaning and staging would take, but surely not long.
It seemed a lot of the hard work was already done, and things were being put back together faster than he’d anticipated. He’d come in from stepping out to get some lunch the day before yesterday to find any trace there’d been a wall in the middle of the kitchen floor was gone, as well as any sign of the bathroom fixtures. It had been done over so quick it was almost like the house had just grown a new layer over the old.
“Wow, it looks like the kitchen has always been this size,” he said to Kevin when he walked in. “You guys work fast.”
Kevin, who had been taking a break of his own on the back porch, said, “We try. We
know how much you guys want to get this done and on the market.”
“That we do,” Mike said, and had gone back inside.
And now it was even closer.
He wanted to try Lynette one more time before getting back to work, so he retreated to the porch where the sound of work inside was dampened, pulled out his phone and called her phone for the sixth or seventh time in four days. It went straight to voicemail again, so he left yet another message.
“Lynette, this is Mike See again, from the Angel Hill Improvement Company in the house of Irving Street, just trying to get hold of you still. We really need to get in touch with you, we’ve got a few issues here at the house and we need to see how long they’ve been problems, so we know what action to take. So if you could please just spare five minutes or so sometime really soon we’d all very much appreciate it. Thanks so much and I hope to hear from you.”
He was able to rattle off the message quickly because he’d left it every time he’d called. He had used the phrase “so we know what action to take” on purpose, the insinuation being there could be some legal action taken if things weren’t resolved. After his first few messages had been ignored, he had to try something that might force her hand, if she was avoiding him.
He was getting pretty pissed at her. In fact, he was getting to the point where he didn’t even care anymore if she had or hadn’t known if there was something wrong with the house, he just wanted her to stop ducking him. And anyway, it had been almost a week since the old guy--whom Mike learned from the paper had been named Sean Ellis--died, and Mike and his partners, as well as Kevin and his workers, had been here every day, for most of them, and no one had dropped dead. So Mike’s belief in Sean’s “curse”, tenuous as that belief had been from the start, was quickly dwindling to nothing. He hadn’t even opened the scrapbook in three days.
The Flip (An Angel Hill novel) Page 16