Natasha’s perfume. I sat up. Fluffy hissed at a shadow and a wave of dizziness curled around my head and back down I went.
When I came to again, my head still hurt like crazy, but the dizziness was gone. I carefully rolled onto my side. Encouraged, I pushed slowly to a sitting position. Still no dizziness. I got to my knees and then to my feet.
I propped myself against the side of the building while I took stock. Everything seemed to be in order. I reached a hand up to touch the side of my head. There was a tender spot, but nothing like the lump I’d expected. Was it just my imagination, or was I recovering from a whack to the head with near miraculous speed?
Hearing the metallic rattle of a mailbox opening, I cautiously looked down into the alley to see my next-door neighbor. Sally was a flight attendant and rarely home. She bumped her small suitcase up the stairs, greeted me with her usual cheery hello and then stopped dead.
“Oh my God, what happened? Are you okay?” Her lips parted, revealing pearly, even teeth as her gaze moved from me to the mess in my apartment, lit crazily by the naked bulb of the lamp on the floor.
“I’m fine. But I…” To my dismay, tears welled up in my eyes. I tried to sniff them back, but there was no stopping them.
“Have you called the police?”
“No, I…” I kicked at some broken bits of plastic on the walkway. “They broke all my phones.”
“Oh, honey.” Sally enveloped me in a hug. She smelled comfortingly of peanuts and a light floral perfume.
The sympathy undid me. Here she was, undoubtedly tired and jet lagged after a long travel stint and hungry enough to have eaten airplane peanuts, but she got out her phone, called the police station and parked herself next to me to wait until they came. She didn’t move from my side as they quizzed me and filled out a report. She rounded up Fluffy and put her in the cat carrier. She called my parents, told them what had happened and asked them to come get me. And all the time, she stayed with me, one hand gently rubbing my back as I quietly cried my way through a box of tissues she’d somehow found in the mess.
“It’s okay, Jo. It’ll all be okay. You’ll see. We’ll get it all back to rights in no time. Don’t you worry.”
She sounded so sure of it that I almost believed her.
*
I spent the night in my old room, in my old twin bed, snuggled deep under the colorful Andy Warhol-inspired comforter I’d chosen in high school. For the first time in weeks I slept like a log. (Except for my mother waking me up every three hours to be sure I didn’t have a concussion.)
The next day, I didn’t talk about going home, and my parents gamely went along with the fiction that I was there for no other reason than to visit. It was all going very well until Saturday night.
The beef stew was burbling away in the oven and it was cocktail hour in the Gartner household. I don’t know why we called it that. My dad was the only one who ever had a cocktail before dinner. It was very 1950s. I think it was his way of asserting his masculinity in a house where he was outnumbered by females. My mother said it gave Dad time to transition from his job at the bank—a male bastion where he was a figure of unquestioned authority—back to the real world.
As usual, Dad had settled deep into his leather club chair with the newspaper, his fingers wrapped around a stout whiskey and soda. My mother had a wineglass with mineral water and a twist of lime. I grabbed a beer out of the fridge for myself.
My mother plucked the bottle out of my hand and handed me a glass of cranberry juice instead.
“Hey!”
“You might have a concussion.”
“I’m fine.”
“That remains to be seen.” Ignoring my sputtering protest, she turned to Dad and said, “Jo’s dating a nice young man.”
I nearly dropped my glass on the carpet. The only correct words in that sentence were “Jo” and “a”. Will wasn’t nice, young, or a man, in the usual sense of the word. And while I couldn’t begin to define our relationship. “Dating” was too pedestrian by half.
I hoped my dad was too absorbed in the Wall Street Journal to have heard. But then the paper rustled and his hand twitched. I threw my mother a furious look, which she pretended not to see.
When I was in high school, dad had kept a bat beside his chair. He would take it out and show it to my dates while I was in the bathroom doing my last minute primping. I didn’t know about this until junior year in high school, when I caught him calmly informing Trent Buckner he’d beat him with it should I come home with so much as a hair out of place.
Furious, I’d made Dad apologize and demanded he get rid of the bat. Which he had, with surprisingly good grace. The next day he’d disappeared after church and returned at dusk with a carload of NRA paraphernalia. My dad, who’d probably never even held a gun in his life, plastered his car with bumper stickers of the “Shoot first, ask questions later” variety and wedged “This house protected by the NRA” signposts in every corner of the lawn. When he sat down for his cocktail that night, he brought with him a thick stack of NRA pamphlets, which he feathered across the side table.
Needless to say, I got no action at all in high school.
“I’m not dating anyone,” I said. It came out a little bitter.
“What about Will?”
“Who? Oh, you mean that guy you met on the stairs? He’s just a friend.”
My father reburied his head in the Wall Street Journal, absently patted the place where the pamphlets used to reside, and sipped his nightly glass of whiskey.
Sunday morning, the honeymoon was over. At eight, the locksmith and I were in front of my apartment admiring the shiny new locks on my door. My parents were there too, as was Fluffy, who was spitting mad about being in a cat carrier during what she had clearly designated as morning nap time.
My mother withheld the check—my check—while she grilled the locksmith. “You’re certain there was no damage to the lock or the door.”
“If you’re asking if the lock was forced, it wasn’t. They probably had a set of keys.” The locksmith turned to my dad. “You know how these apartment landlords are. They don’t spend good money changing the locks between tenants.” He pushed back his Dodgers cap, gave his scalp a scratch and refit the hat low on his forehead. “Probably dozens of keys to this place floating around out there.”
My mother’s alabaster skin darkened to a shade of red that clashed with her candy-apple red hair. Dad and I unconsciously moved closer together. It was hard to say what had set her off the most. The fact that the landlord had gone all “this is man’s talk” in the middle of responding to her question, the assumption that she didn’t know everything there was to know about landlords, or the idea that I had been living alone in an apartment where dozens of lowlifes with keys could have popped in at any time.
Under other circumstances, the idea of all those keys “floating around out there” would have freaked me out even more than it did my mother. But I knew my apartment hadn’t been ripped apart by a former tenant. The person who had done this to me was the same person who had trashed Tom’s apartment, looking for the manuscript.
It wouldn’t have been hard to break into my place. Like every other female volunteer at the haunted house, I’d left my purse “hidden” in the rehearsal room. Anyone who wanted to get my address and “borrow” my keys to make duplicates at the hardware store need only to have conducted a half-assed search.
What I didn’t understand was why. Why would they think I had it? Why now? And then I remembered. The notes. Will had found Solaire’s notes. Someone must have seen us come out of Tom’s apartment looking victorious and misunderstood. I closed my eyes and thought back. I’d been carrying my big purse, the one that functions as a book bag. Oh, yeah. They thought I had it.
I opened my eyes to find my mother, my father and Fluffy looking at me. The locksmith was looking at my mother as if she were a volcano about to blow. I plucked the check out of her fist and passed it to the locksmith.
�
��Thanks so much for coming out here this morning. I really appreciate it.”
“No problem.” Clearly relieved, he handed me the keys. “Here ya go. Two sets. Comes standard with the new lock.”
As the locksmith bulleted out of there, I shoved one set of keys into my mother’s hands. Later, I’d make extra copies for myself and one for my landlord.
Her sunset-red mouth pursed as she assessed my door. “Hal, I think—”
“I’ll go get my tool kit from the car.” Dad started down the stairs.
“Why does he need the tool kit?”
“Your father is going to install a safety latch on your door.”
“I’m not sure I’m allowed to put holes in the door without my landlord’s permission.” The only reason my landlord had allowed me to have my locks changed was because Sally had had the foresight to call and ask him while the police were still here.
“A few dollars out of your deposit is a small price to pay for your safety.”
If only safety came that cheap.
The keys turned smoothly in the new locks. I pushed open the door and sucked in a breath. If anything, the damage looked worse in the daytime. My mother, right behind me, didn’t make a sound. She picked a path through the books and papers to stand in the middle of the room. After a brief survey, she pulled a fresh two-pack of dishwashing gloves out of her purse and handed a pair to me.
“Put those on. We have work to do.”
Four hours later, the three of us had righted all the furniture and returned all my books and knickknacks to their proper places. My mother was walking around, clicking her tongue and making a list. My father had disappeared into my bedroom with his tool kit. At the sound of the whirr of his drill, I left my mother to her muttering and list making and jogged into the bedroom. Dad was making holes in my windowsill so he could install a security bar.
“I’m not sure my landlord allows…”
He shot me a look that told me what he thought of my landlord’s rules and continued drilling.
A little before one, we left to get lunch and then made the circuit around the mall. I needed a new futon mattress, sheets and pillows (The burglar hadn’t bothered to strip the bed before taking a knife to it.) and a host of other things, from a new cell phone to vacuum bags. My parents kept trying to sneak in upgrades but I drew the line when I sighted my father in the furniture department, sitting on a couch. I thought he was tired and taking a well-deserved break. Until he got up, walked over to the next couch and plunked himself down on it.
My father never gave up a seat on a perfectly decent couch without a good reason.
I strode over and positioned myself between him and the leather ottoman that matched the couch he was presently sitting on, forcing him to look up. His look of irritation changed to guilt when he realized the pair of legs standing between him and the ottoman belonged to me.
“My couch is fine,” I said.
“Oh, em…”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Jo,” said my mother, coming up beside me. “The stuffing is coming out of yours.”
She put her fingers around one of the couch cushions and squeezed it thoughtfully.
“Yet another problem duct tape can solve,” I said.
“This one’s too soft,” she informed my father.
He didn’t reply. He was relaxed back on the couch, lost in happy visions of duct tape, man’s greatest tool, a dreamy smile on his face.
She turned back to me. “You are not going to repair that couch with tape.”
“No one will see it when I flip over the cushions. I can sew the rips properly, later. It will be a nice, relaxing project for me.”
She inhaled a breath and let it out through tight lips. “Let us do this one thing for you.”
“No!” I squeezed my mother’s arm. “I appreciate the offer, but you’ve both already done too much.” As she started to protest, I added, “Really. I don’t know what I would have done without your help, but it’s important to me that my apartment still looks like my apartment.”
As I said the words, I realized how much I meant them. To my mother, it was a loss of a few hundred dollars worth of cheap, often secondhand, mostly mismatched things. But they were things I’d picked out. I’d bought them with my paychecks.
“As ugly as that couch is, it’s mine and I like it.”
Dad grunted and got up off the couch. He pulled out his car keys. “Jo’s right. It would be impossible to find another couch that ugly. Let’s go.”
By the time we got back to my apartment, it was after five. Twilight. The early trick-or-treaters, costumed and clasped in their parents’ arms, were making a slow circuit of their immediate neighbors. Becky had joked that I lived in Brady Bunch land and it was never more apparent than on nights like this. Soon it would be dark enough for the kindergartners and grade schoolers to come out. Parents would stand around on the wide sidewalks, chatting in groups and watching the kids race from door to door, collecting candy from each other’s houses.
My mother was cooing over an infant in a bee costume. I took bags from the trunk and started upstairs. My new key turned like butter. Flicking on the light, I winced from the glare of the naked bulb and stopped dead on the threshold.
For a breathless moment, I thought it had been broken into again…by a gang of scrubbing bubbles. My apartment was cleaner than it had ever been. The carpet had been vacuumed into a paler shade of beige, the books on the bookshelves were aligned by ruler, and every surface sparkled. Even the walls looked as if they’d been scrubbed.
“Oh good. I was hoping they’d be done before we got home.”
I dropped my bags, turned to my mother and hugged her tightly. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
My mother sniffed. “Well, we weren’t going to leave you with all that fingerprinting dust everywhere.”
Dad, loaded with purchases, pushed his way through the door.
“You guys have been so great, all weekend.”
“We’re not done yet,” Dad said gruffly, planting a kiss on the top of my head. He dropped the bags and headed back down to the car. “Come help me with the futon mattress.”
A half-hour later, they left. They tried to take me for dinner, but a relaxing sit-down meal would only make me tired and I still had a lot of settling in I needed to do.
Two hours later, my new sheets were clean and smelling of fabric softener, every bag was unloaded and I’d put away and puttered to my heart’s content. I fried up a hamburger, made myself a small salad and threw a few cookies in the toaster oven to reheat, so my apartment smelled like home again, instead of cleaning products.
By eight o’clock, I was bored silly. I’d given up all hope of having any trick-or-treaters (Apparently apartments were still considered dangerous by the neighborhood parents who decided such things.) and was unwrapping mini Krackels for myself. There was nothing on TV because, for some reason, they had aired It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown a week ago.
I could hear party sounds through the open slits of my newly armored windows. I had been invited to a couple of the neighbors’ parties, in a casual, “Hey, you should come” sort of way. I suppose I could still go. I could walk over to the gas station on the corner and get a six pack of beer to share. When they asked why I wasn’t at the haunted house I’d simply tell them I was no longer volunteering there.
So what if I’d promised Dan I would help out? That was Friday and this was Sunday. Two days away from the place helped me see the Milverne for what it was—a freaking breeding ground of misery. Tom was dead. Nice-boy Lenny had been turned into Natasha’s vampire arm candy. I’d been knocked out and my home had been ransacked. And in a nice twist, newly bloodthirsty Lenny now lurked in the shadows for an opportunity to get rid of me.
The only reason I had gotten involved in the first place was because of Becky and now she hated me for something I didn’t really do and would never be able to explain to her satisfaction. Not that she was giving me the chance.
I charged into my now-spotless bedroom, reached into the back of my closet and yanked my vampire costume off its hanger. From my bathroom cupboard, I pulled out my sewing kit and sewed a small pocket into my cape. It might be poor form to take scissors and thread to a borrowed theater costume, but after being skidded along pavement through two falls, another hole was the least of its worries. And I was damned if I was going to be without a cell phone again. Ten minutes later, I threw open my shiny new deadbolt and stepped into the night.
*
Walking to the front of the line, I stepped through the black-sheeted gap in the gate to the serpent-headed start of the haunted house.
A heavy hand clamped down on my arm. “Thank God you’re here.” Marty shoved the ticket basket into my hands. “We’re swamped. I’ve been calling in favors, trying to get people out here.”
As usual, he was wearing a suit, but tonight it seemed to hang off his body like loose skin. He was sweating and looked haggard.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Fine, fine.” He didn’t meet my eyes.
The crowd surged against the gate and a dozen people came through the opening, handing me tickets. Marty glanced into the dark mouth of the snake and waved the group through.
That was different. “Where are the tour guides?” I asked.
“They’re there, waiting just beyond the fangs. Faster that way.”
As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I saw Angelina standing inside the serpent’s mouth, just beyond the long white fangs. As usual, she looked impatient and a little bored.
A volunteer I hadn’t met before came in through the gate, breathing heavily. “Animals!” He turned to Marty. “We’re going to have to sell tickets here. It’s not safe being out there with all that cash.”
Liz Jasper - Underdead 02 Page 19