by Matt Cole
“I knew you could make this place a home. It is truly lovely what you have done with it. If you had seen the old house you would be more shocked too.”
“Thank you for finding me this place. I knew you were the right person to call when I decided to move back to Strafford. Thanks, Arlene.”
“We’re all glad you’re back, Deena. You just put that bum, Joseph, behind you and start anew just like this house. If you can make your life look as good as you have this house you should be landing yourself a millionaire husband in a few weeks.”
“Oh, I’m not at all ready to begin dating again...”
“I can’t say that I blame you there. You know, now that you have finished the house, perhaps you can find your way down to church on Sunday. Ummm...what do you think? I know some single, Christian men who wouldn’t mind meeting you.”
“I may attend church, but again I’m not ready to start dating right now.”
Arlene walked slowly around the house, looking at perfectly matched furniture and rugs, and the window treatments that were weighted at the hems so they wouldn’t billow when the new windows were opened. She took in the perfect join of the walls and ceilings, and the wood floors that were the softest tan she had ever seen in any house.
“The place suits you, Deena. You have done an amazing job. You should be an interior designer. You could make a decent living doing that,” Arlene said in hopes that Deena would be inspired to come and work for her.
“Maybe later, Arlene. I have enough on my plate currently and sufficient money in the bank to start that writing career I’ve always wanted.”
“Please don’t tell me you actually want to write those ghastly romance novels that cheapen the very existence of women,” Arlene said in shock.
“There is good money in romance novels,” Deena replied. “But, no, I am working on something more serious right now.”
“Oh, you have to let me read your work sometime.”
“When I am confident it isn’t awful, then perhaps I will.”
“Well, if you write as well as you decorate I’m sure whatever you write will be first rate and a bestseller.”
Deena smiled and blushed. “Thank you, Arlene.”
Arlene came back to the middle of the floor, in the living room, and turned a full circle. Then trying to ignore the hair-raising prickle she’d always gotten looking at the basement door, which was visible from the living room, she swiftly said a prayer.
“The house is wonderful,” Arlene said. “I wouldn’t change a thing.” It was a lie and silently she wondered if Deena could tell.
* * * *
Deena wrote Arlene a check for the next month’s rent, having already paid the deposit, first and last month’s rent in advance, and handed it over. Arlene thanked her, folded the check smartly, tucking it into her purse, wondering what it would be like for a recently divorced and employed woman to write checks in the multiple thousands without thinking about it.
“Remember to mention me to your friends if they need a real estate agent, and be kind,” Arlene said with a smile.
“I will. This doesn’t mean that you will stop coming around, does it?” Deena asked.
“Heaven’s no. I’m harder to get rid of than the flu.”
“Good to hear.”
“And...this is for you,” Arlene announced, handing Deena a bag of pure sugar.
“Oh, wow, um...thank you,” Deena said with true gratitude. She’d finished off the last bag of sugar a few days before and hadn’t had time to replenish it, and she vowed to hoard this one.
“Well, if there isn’t anything else,” Arlene said, “I have some paperwork to finish and another rental to show across town.”
“Of course.” Deena did her best to sound as if she meant it.
“Then we’ll meet for lunch, and you’ll come back to admire my latest efforts on writing the great American novel.”
“Absolutely,” Arlene lied. She was going to go straight to church and beg forgiveness for all of her white lies.
“Oh, before you go,” Deena interjected rather harshly, startling Arlene.
“Yes, what’s on your mind?”
“When will I get to meet Mr. Marsden?”
Arlene looked shocked and was at a loss for words.
Deena took note.
“What’s wrong?”
Arlene’s grip on her purse tightened, her breath became shallow, and her heart beat quickened. “Nothing—it’s that...well...um...Mr. Marsden moved back into the basement last week. I had thought for certain he would have said something to you. I’m guessing he didn’t.”
“No, he didn’t.”
Deena walked Arlene to her car, watched her climb in, and shut the door for her. She waved goodbye to Arlene, who waved back, and then Deena headed back to the house.
Deena was a little freaked out that Mr. Marsden had moved himself into the basement without her ever seeing or hearing him.
* * * *
“Well, I never thought I’d set foot in this house,” Willard Swader said.
“I’m glad you two came,” Deena replied.
“Today, the grand unveiling,” Maggie Swader noted.
“If you so desire,” Deena mumbled.
“Of course, we desire. We’ve been waiting nearly thirty years to see the inside of this house,” Maggie added.
“Oh...at least there’s no pressure then, huh? So you never set foot in this house before today?”
“Not even a pinkie toe,” Willard said and laughed.
“To be honest, we were scared of the place,” Maggie said.
“But I thought you said those were just silly stories,” Deena replied.
“They are, of course,” Maggie admitted unconvincingly. “And we’re both silly old fools. Now show us what you’ve done with the place.”
Deena stood up. “All right, but don’t expect Better Homes and Gardens material.”
The three of them trooped across the living room into the kitchen as Deena hung back a few feet from the basement door, watching the older couple—hoping against hope that the strange sensation starting to run across her neck and down her arms was a relic of the old house and not indicative of the basement or house today. It felt much like what Deena had referred to as ghost pain, like when you could still feel a limb after it had been amputated.
The couple ranged around, oohing and aahing at one feature or another as Willard went into the hall, then did an about face and came right back. Maggie opened the door to the bathroom; Willard took a peek inside the guest bedroom; he then went into the bathroom and flushed the toilet. To make sure it worked properly? Deena could only guess. Maggie ran her hands across the marble countertops in the kitchen and said, “Gorgeous work.”
Willard tried out the couch, then called to Maggie, pointing to the new “entertainment center” with the fifty-two inch LCD flat panel television. “Guess we’ll have the Super Bowl party here.”
“Sure, sounds great,” Deena said.
No one said anything for a few minutes. A little later, less than five minutes, Deena thought the couple was back at the basement door in the kitchen.
“Always wondered what he does down there,” Willard stated.
“I wouldn’t know,” Deena said truthfully. “I haven’t even met him yet.”
“But he lives down there, doesn’t he?” asked Maggie.
“Apparently,” Deena said. “I don’t know anything about Mr. Marsden.”
“Don’t you think that is odd?” Willard asked.
“I suppose he’s just a private person,” Deena said, not wanting to get too much into her mysterious landlord’s behavior.
“Even so,” Willard said finally, to Deena’s pleasure, walking away from the basement door.
Silence again. Then Maggie, who had less patience than a kindergartener, said, “You should be proud of what you have done with the place. It is fantastic.”
“Has either of you heard from Arlene in the past few days?” Deena qu
estioned. “She was supposed to be here today, too.”
Willard shrugged his shoulders while Maggie shook her head.
It had been three days since Deena had seen or heard from Arlene.
No one mentioned how creepy or spooky the house had been, or her mysterious landlord. Deena served the chips and salsa with jalapenos, just the way Willard liked them, saving some for Arlene who still hadn’t shown up.
Traffic across town must be bad or there’d been some harmless, real estate crisis to put down, Deena thought. What else could be keeping her?
“I bet it’s her car,” Maggie said brightly. “You know how the weather changes; one day it’s cold, the next it warms up some thirty degrees. That has probably wreaked havoc on her car.”
“Yeah, those foreign cars aren’t as trustworthy as you young people think,” Willard added between globs of salsa.
“No, her car runs just fine. It’s not her car,” Deena muttered.
Willard had been born in the town and practically knew everyone. It wasn’t that he got along with everyone in the town. There must be lots of tangled relationships in Strafford, Deena imagined, but not around this table.
The three had finished eating, though Maggie had to remind Willard to “save room for his dinner.”
Willard and Maggie cleaned the table, and Deena trailed them into the kitchen. Willard excused himself from washing the dishes as that was “women’s work” and made his way to the sofa where he promptly put his feet up and undid the button on his pants.
Deena and Maggie quickly gathered the desert and coffee and followed Willard into the living room.
There was a loud creak and this startled Deena.
“Arlene!” Deena dropped the coffee pot as she raced out; the pot teetered on the edge of the coffee table, and Willard reached for it, burning himself. “Holy Mother of Christ!” He yanked a handkerchief out of his pocket and wound it around his hand. Maggie jumped up.
“I’ll get something for that,” she said. “And watch your mouth, Willard.”
Spilled coffee soaked into Deena’s new area rug. Maggie said, “Better get something before the stain settles in or you’ll never get it out.”
Deena rushed into the kitchen, unable to remember if she had purchased any club soda. She didn’t see any and then went to the sink, grabbing a towel and wetting it with cold water.
After a few minutes of lightly dabbing the moistened cloth on the stain, Deena was able to prevent serious damage to the rug.
No one mentioned the basement or the candles and incense. Deena served the desert, saving some for Arlene, who still hadn’t shown up.
Traffic through town must be bad or there had been some harmless domestic crisis, Deena thought. Steve couldn’t have backslid so soon, could he?
He’d sought professional help and had not laid a hand on Arlene since, and she’d finally stopped jumping at unexpected noises; her face smoothed out, and she had not had to wear the huge, mirror-lens sunglasses in months.
Chapter 2
Rosemary Spiner was having a rough night. In another hour it would midnight. She wasn’t expecting the new day to be any better than the previous.
She was still fuming about her argument with her boyfriend, Tommy Carlson, a thirty-four year unemployed mechanic. She stomped out of his apartment in a huff. Then, when she went back an hour later to apologize, they started fighting all over again. That’s when she said to hell with it and left a second time, figuring she might as well go to work.
Pacing back and forth at the corner of Clemens and Picard Streets, she cursed under her breath and kicked at the trash littering the sidewalk: empty coffee cups, bright aluminum cans, which would soon be scooped up like treasure by neighborhood bums on their nightly rounds, and soggy mounds of what had been sheets from that afternoon’s newspaper, now reduced to mush by a heavy, early-evening shower.
The rain had been the forerunner of a Northeastern cold front barreling down the Eastern seaboard, bringing a jolting taste of winter to the Pennsylvania’s north side slums. As she performed a little hop-and-skip around the puddles of dirty water, she burrowed deeper into her thin windbreaker, seeking relief from the plunging temperatures.
All the while, even as she swore against Tommy and the weather, she kept an eye on the street, sensitive to the cars that braked and cruised slowly past while the drivers gave her the once-over. Every time one of them seemed about to stop, she made an effort to look cheerful, flashing a fake, airline-hostess smile.
What the drivers saw was a thin, striking-looking woman of medium height clad in sneakers and skin-tight jeans. Rosemary Spiner had fine, well-developed features, inherited from her Puerto Rican father rather than her black mother. Her nose was long and straight, her lips pencil thin, and her skin the color of coffee with double cream. Fortunately for her, the dim light hid the hard lines at the corners of her mouth and the flat glint in her eyes; the cool stare that was much older than her twenty-six years. When it looked as though a potential john was really interested, Spiner gave her head a swift jerk, setting the waves in her outsize wig jiggling like a fat man’s stomach.
Customarily she had no trouble attracting men, but tonight was exceptionally slow. As the evening wore on, she became increasingly desperate. It was cold and wet on the glum street corner, but she couldn’t afford to give up yet. She did not want to quit without at least one quick trick. She needed the money. A rabbit-fast liaison in a seedy motel or the back of a car would make her night and give her enough money for a hot dinner.
As she reached the edge of her self-defined boundary and reversed her course to make another circuit, a pair of headlights glared, went slightly past her and stopped. Glancing over, she opened her eyes slightly in surprise when she saw that it was a shiny new pewter-over-white Toyota Camry, complete with gleaming continental kit.
As she stared, the window glided down and a man spoke. It was a white man’s voice, soft and low. “Howdy,” he said, leaning forward. “You sellin’?”
“Uh, huh,” Spiner responded, straining to see inside. Despite the gloom, she caught a reflection of light off a big, expensive-looking watch on the man’s right wrist.
“How much we talking?” he asked affably.
She named her price and he made a counter offer: “Will you take twenty?”
It didn’t take her long to decide. In response, she opened the door and slid into the passenger seat, noticing as she did the initials FGM painted on the door in sinuous black script. The smell inside the car was intoxicating, an overwhelming aroma of leather and wax. The Toyota was only two weeks off the dealer’s floor.
“My name’s Frank,” the man said.
“I’m Rachel,” Rosemary answered, using her favorite alias. Rachel was a nice name, she felt, infinitely fancier than Rosemary. To her it was class; it went better with her image of herself as a slightly exotic hooker.
“I need to make a quick stop first,” the man said as he pulled away. A few minutes later he aimed the car into a crowded lot of a nearby drug store.
When he walked inside, she went with him. He bought an energy drink; however he offered her nothing. Clutching his cold drink in his left hand, he strolled back to the pharmacy and took a seat facing the parking lot. She took the seat next to him.
In the store’s bright light she could see him clearly, appraising with interest the thick gold chain and gold cross visible through the open neck of his dress shirt. In counterpoint to the jewelry and the heavy watch, which she now saw carried the Rolex name, the man wore an inexpensive leather jacket with cowhide fringes down the arms.
The jacket was stained, and in spots the leather had rubbed through, leaving irregular shiny patches that looked like moth holes. It smelled, too, of sweat and grease, among other scents, a fact evident now that it wasn’t camouflaged by the new-car smell.
The man, Spiner noticed, was not the cleanest john she had ever done business with. His dark beard was neatly trimmed and his hair had recently been style
d, but now it was unwashed, hanging in greasy ringlets over his ears. His shirt had a slept-in look, and his pants, although fairly new, were marked with traces of oil and dirt. He had a strong jaw, though, and a straight nose. His most arresting feature was his eyes; they were as expressionless as two green marbles. As she looked into them, a shiver ran up her spine.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“I already told you,” he said. “Frank.”
“Frank what?” she persisted.
“Frank Marsden,” he said, lapsing into silence, quietly sipping from his energy drink.
“Let’s go,” he said after a few minutes.
“Where are we going?”
“My house,” he answered, already heading for the door.
* * * *
Marsden pulled out of the lot and pointed the car north, deeper into the slum district. Speeding recklessly down the potholed streets, one foot on the brake and one on the gas, Marsden said nothing as they maneuvered through an expanse of row houses, block after block of dwellings sitting literally on the cracked sidewalks.
In years past, this section of town had been home to hardworking blue-collar immigrants, Irish for the most part, who took pride in their surroundings and kept the streets as spotless as their houses. When these immigrants and their descendants abandoned the neighborhood for the suburbs, the blacks and Hispanics who moved in were not so fastidious.
However, the neighborhood had earned the nickname “Old Town” because of highly publicized advertised revitalization of the area. When they got to South Douty Street, Marsden took a sharp left, nearly clipping an abandoned Ford parked along the curb. The car’s windows were shaded a dark black. Just past the car, Marsden turned left again, swinging through a gap in a waist-high chain-link fence into a newly sodded yard. The name on the mailbox read Hopping.
Frank Marsden was home.
Number 1420 South Douty Street was an anomaly. For blocks around in all directions, there was nothing but row houses; street after street of grim, deteriorating dwellings lying on their deathbeds with their chins in the street. Relics of ages gone by. But Frank Marsden’s house that he rented to Deena Hopping was different. It was not only set back a dozen or more yards from the sidewalk, but it was unattached on one side, leaving enough space for a small yard and a driveway, which led to the rarest structure of all, considering the neighborhood: a garage.