COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2011 by Michael R. Collings
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
PROLOGUE
So she is dead.
The young man sat silently, hidden in deep shadow, sheltered by thick masses of star jasmine heavy with blossoms. The air lay still, cloying with the scent of the flowers, sweltering from the persistent heat. Fourth straight day of triple-digit temperature, and now, well past midnight, it was probably still in the high nineties.
No break from an off-shore breeze tonight. Again.
He tapped one finger nervously on the newspaper lying on the cheap wooden patio table next to him. The pages were folded to highlight the obituaries. The rough paper felt slightly damp.
She is dead.
It said so right there in grainy black and white, hardly more than a sentence outlining birth and death dates. No mention of family or survivors.
What will this mean for me, he thought, leaning his lanky frame against the creaking chaise and crossing his bare feet at the ankles. He brushed at his longish hair, still damp from a shower that had done little to cool him down, clearing his eyes.
He glanced toward his left, toward her house, knowing even as he did so that he would see nothing. The jasmine was too thick. That was why he was out here, after all, wearing nothing more than a bath towel loosely cinched at his waist, nearly naked. It was the coolest place he could think of, and there was no chance of anyone seeing him, even if he chose to loosen the towel to the hot night air.
He rolled a cold beer can back and forth against his forehead, thankful for the condensation that helped cool his skin. He felt sticky and slick with sweat, even after the shower. His eyes ached. He’d spent too much time reading freshman essays by a dim lamp, trying to keep the heat down. Should have stopped hours ago but….
He shut his eyes and tried to draw a deep, relaxing breath. The air felt thick and tasted stale from car exhaust drifting up against the mountains from the freeway that wound sinuously through the valley.
It was just too hot.
His mind drifted back to the obituary.
She was dead.
He sighed. The sound seemed oddly loud, disruptive against the heavy air.
Abruptly he sat straight up.
Had he heard something in the dense bank of river willows that bordered the back yard? Rustling, maybe?
He strained to hear but there was nothing now. He must have imagined it, or perhaps picked up on the movement of a squirrel or neighborhood cat. The willow branches hung in a thick veil to the ground, effectively hiding the broken-down slat fence between his place and the one behind him. The ground was so overgrown with weeds that in the months he had rented this place he had never even tried to penetrate them. He just pushed the antique reel mower that had come with the house to the edge of the willows and stopped there, usually streaming with sweat from the effort. No one seemed to mind the jungle-like growth. She certainly hadn’t. Or at least she’d never said anything about it.
Or about much of anything else.
He took a long pull on the beer. It felt cool all the way down.
When he sat the can down on the old table, his hand shook slightly, as if he were nervous. Or frightened.
About what?
But now that the thought had passed through his mind, he couldn’t block it. He felt nervous. The sweat beading his brow seemed heavier than the heat could account for. His heart was beating slightly faster than usual.
Thrumm-thrumm-thrumm.
There. There was the sound again. Not so much a rustling as a faint, staticky buzz, almost below the level of hearing. If there had been any breeze that night, if the willows had been moving with even faint, ghostly fingers of wind, he probably could not have heard it.
But there it was.
He sat still, barely breathing.
It was gone.
He sat for a long while, not moving. Finally he reached for the beer again. The can was nearly empty. Maybe he had drunk too much too fast. Maybe he just thought he heard the sound.
He glanced over at the willows, their thin branches as insubstantial in the darkness as tendrils of smoke. The leaves seemed to shimmer slightly, just the faintest suggestion of silver as the leaves moved, stirred by…what?
Not a wind.
Maybe a cat. Or a squirrel. A fruit rat.
Maybe.
Finally the young man stood and stretched. He stepped to the edge of the patio, where he could see beyond the jasmine, and stared at the hedge that lined the left hand side of the yard. If it were daylight, he would be able to see the weathered gables of her house, barely jutting above the thicket.
At night, nothing was visible.
He waited there. Listening.
When he heard nothing more, he turned and entered the house, letting the wood-frame screen door slam lightly behind him.
In the yard, nothing moved. Except the willows, dragging slightly across the ragged grass.
CHAPTER ONE
The Greer had been dead for almost two weeks, but Nick Wheeler still shuddered inwardly at the thought of her. Don’t be a jerk, he reminded himself furiously again and again during those two endless weeks. But whenever memories of the old woman surfaced like a bleached and bloated corpse rising without warning from the dark depths of a stagnant pond, he couldn’t help it. He shuddered.
It was not as if he were a kid frightened spitless by a ghost story masterfully recounted over the embers of a dying campfire or anything like that. After all, for three interminable years he had been enrolled at least part-time in a Ph.D. program at UCLA—one class a quarter, that sort of thing. He only had a couple more years to finish the course work or the department would kick him out on his sorry ass, but by the time The Greer died he was not sure he still wanted to try to finish. Even with just a Masters he could usually pick up the odd class or two to teach at local community colleges. The slave wages they offered adjunct faculty was enough to make a few bucks, enough to keep alive.
There was a lot wrong with Los Angeles, Nick knew, but at least he could keep going, nickel-and-diming it semester after semester. With over a dozen small colleges within easy driving range of his place—coupled with a portfolio of excellent recommendations—he had a solid pool of part-time possibilities.
Within easy driving range of his place.
The idea was laughable in its own way, since that was how he had met The Greer in the first place.
Soon after arriving in Los Angeles, fresh from the hinterlands of Montana, Nick Wheeler realized that he desperately needed a permanent place to live that would let him tap into the pool of part-time jobs while staying close enough for his course work at UCLA. Back then he still dreamed of writing a brilliant dissertation on some obscure Renaissance writer and winning fame and fortune—or at least a respected tenured position—preferably at one of the Ivy League schools. That would mean devoting as much time as he could to his research. And that, in turn, meant that he had to find a close, convenient place.
There was one additional requirement, even more critical given the state of his finances: the place had to be dirt cheap.
Rents were impossibly steep near UCLA. On his first day of apartment hunting, he had looked at a two-room cesspool with peeling hospital-green paint, visibly sagging walls, an exposed water heater in a screened-in back porch that the owner had advertised (with an absolutely straight face) as the “second bedroom,” and a blown-out bare-wire bulb dangling from the living room ceiling, its worn extension cord twisted like a strangled idea. One straggling, black-branched apricot tree half his height, stuck like an anorexic tombstone in the middle of a weed-choked back yard, had been highlighted in the ad as a “flourishing fruit tree.”
Hah!
The place had listed with the rental agency at more than twice Nick’s total monthly income just because it was within five miles of the campus.
I can’t live in a dump like this, he had thought as he shuffled his feet through littered newspapers and magazines strewn around the postage-stamp living room/kitchen combo. Trying to envision himself settling into that place gave him a chill down his spine, and he had beaten a hasty retreat back to his car where he sat for an hour studying the rental listings he had purchased at an off-campus housing center for $25.00. Nothing else nearby came even this close top fitting his strapped budget, and he wouldn’t force his worst enemy to spend an hour in the place, so he ranged outward.
He began by drawing concentric circles on a map, focused on Westwood, and spending Saturdays scouring “For Rent” ads in Green-shoppers, all the while living out of a suitcase in the spare room at the house of a third-cousin-once-removed, his wife, and his three kids. The kids weren’t so bad.
At first, in fact, the arrangement with Chuck seemed more than passable. Chuck had tried his damnedest to make Nick feel at home and cut through some of the inevitable Southern California culture shock, even though Nick had parted from Montana—and his folks—on rather less than cordial terms some months before. Terri, whom Nick had not seen since Chuck’s wedding almost six years before, was both pretty and nice. Even the kids were fun, especially when, their breath smelling lightly of popcorn or of Oreo®s, the two older ones cuddled on his lap late in the evenings and fell asleep, their rhythmical breathing calming his nerves. It relaxed him, often putting him to sleep before the kids.
But there were problems.
His bedroom was originally intended as Terri’s all-purpose room, so he had to live around an ironing board that seemed permanently rooted to faded gray Solarian® tiles, Kmart® bracket shelves littered with Niagara™ spray starch and dead bottles of Spray ’n Wash®, and, on every horizontal surface (sometimes including his bed) heaps of dirty and stacks of clean laundry. There was a touch of his own home about her lackadaisical housekeeping, so Nick wasn’t particularly bothered by the mess.
The baby’s changing table was in there too, which, since Nick was the oldest of seven children, didn’t bother him either…until the fifth or sixth night.
He was fast asleep that night, exhausted by the first day of graduate-school registration, when Terri shuffled in at three a.m. to change Esther. She was quiet enough, and Nick never did quite know why he woke up. But there she was, standing in her nightgown not six feet away, her figure outlined by the dim light from the hall—dim, but bright enough to glow through the silkily translucent material and give Nick a silhouette view that surely she couldn’t have intended.
Staring through sleep-drugged eyes, focusing gradually on her hips and thighs and milk-heavy breasts, Nick suddenly became aware of coolness on his thigh and groin where he must have kicked the sheet away in the stifling heat of LA in August. He didn’t wear pajamas or underwear to bed, hadn’t since he was twelve and started sleeping away hot summer nights in the tree house he and his buddies built in the crotch of an oak tree in the far corner of the Wheeler’s back yard. Now he wished desperately that he had gotten back into the habit. He didn’t dare move for fear any sound would remind her that he was sleeping in the same room. If she turned just an inch or so, she would see him
He lay there, silent and still, but intensely, frustratingly aware of her nearness. His body registered that nearness with a rush of heat that made his temples break out in a sticky sweat. He tried not to breath, not to move, not even to slip his leg beneath the sheet and bend it away from where the hall-light glare cast a telltale shadow across his middle. His blood pounded so loudly that surely she must hear it and run.
Terri handled the baby with skill and dispatch—but then she had had enough practice with the older two. It couldn’t have been more than four or five minutes before she finished, wrapped the baby receiving blanket, cradled Esther in the crook of her arm, and slipped out the door.
Nick felt stale pent-up air slip silently through lips suddenly desert dry. That was close. Too close. The tension had locked muscles until he could barely move. Instead, he closed his eyes and listened to his heart-blood throbbing in his temples and throat and thought never again never again never again. It was over. He was safe. He opened his eyes and glanced toward the doorway. She was standing there as if waiting for him—daring him—to look.
“Night, Nick,” Terri whispered over her shoulder just before she disappeared down the hall. The light silhouetted her buttocks and legs where they shifted beneath the silken nightgown.
“Won’t hear of it,” Chuck said boisterously the next morning at breakfast when Nick suggested that it might be better for him to room with a student he knew vaguely from his undergraduate days and who was looking for someone to split rent on an apartment. “Won’t hear of it. Nick. Waste of money. We got plenty of room here, don’t we, honey.”
Terri glanced up at Nick from an oatmeally mess plastered around the chipped edges of Esther’s Care-Bear cereal bowl and smiled.
“Sure. You know we’re glad to have you.”
“That’s settled, then,” Chuck said, thumping his hand palm-down on the vinyl tablecloth as if making his decision as irrevocable as God blasting His commandments into the stone tablets on Mount Sinai. “You’re staying here till you get something permanent. We sure as hell don’t mind.”
Terri looked up again and smiled. Nick looked down at his half-empty plate.
The next night he broke with habit and wore undershorts to bed. They felt strange after sleeping for so long without anything on, constraining and tight when he felt that he most needed at least the illusion of freedom. The elastic chafed at his waist and legs but even so it was better that way than without.
Terri never gave him any overt evidence of sexual interest but he felt uncomfortable the next night, and the next, when he woke at three a.m. to her soft movements less than an arm’s length away. Both nights, she had exchanged her silky nightgown for shorty-short pajamas that barely covered her hips and buttocks. Even when, after the second week and at Nick’s quiet insistence, Chuck moved the changing table into their cramped master bedroom, Nick felt uneasy.
For the moment, though, it seemed that the problem with Terri was marginally under control.
There was another problem, however, more personal and more enduring and if possible more humiliating, largely because of the unpleasant memories it triggered. About two weeks into his stay, Nick began waking up every other night or so to find one of the older kids cuddled against either his belly or his back. Generally that made no difference to how Nick slept.
Unfortunately, little Billy—lovable as he might be—was still not quite housebroken, and Nick had an understandable aversion to rolling over in the middle of the night onto a damp spot and startling awake to a sickening wet squish and the too-familiar pungency of urine. The first time it happened, even before he was fully awake he grabbed himself to make sure his shorts were dry—then realized what he had assumed, even after all the years since he had finally conquered his own extended bout of childhood bedwetting. Stirring those memories made the experience even worse.
The worst, though, was that wetting the bed didn’t seem to faze Billy. The damned kid could be spouting like Moby Dick—thar she blows, sperm whale dead ahead, thar she blows—and still be sleeping the sleep of the dead. The first time it happened, Terri calmly changed the sheets sometime the next day, neither apologizing nor explaining. Nick had said nothing to her about it, but that night when he slipped between the crisp sheets, he heard the telltale rustle of a plastic pad and within moments felt a sticky clinging of sweaty flesh against impermeable plastic.
It was hours before he finally dropped off into a restless sleep.
All in all, the arrangement at Chuck’s was not conducive either to sleep or to study.
After a few weeks of frustration, bad nights, and constan
tly wearing jeans and T-shirts that were beginning to take on the distinctive odor of baby powder and stale urine, Nick grew desperate to find a place of his own.
As he ranged farther out from UCLA, he discovered with relief that housing established an inverse mathematical ratio: apartments got larger and rents smaller. But for a couple of weeks, the proportion still wasn’t good enough.
Finally, he reached the outer circle of the area he had marked, the farthest he could go and not spend more on gas and oil for his car than he would save on rent. The most likely place for a last-ditch search seemed to be a tiny area among the inland foothills of the Coastal Range, in older bedroom communities mostly made up of forty-year-old frame houses on huge lots fronting wide, shrub-hedged streets. The area was not quite ripe for urban renewal, not central enough to sprout multi-level condos overnight. The houses sported sway-backed roof lines and erratically replaced shingle tiles, more than one cracked pane in side doors, and roaches scuttling for cover when kitchen doors creaked open. But the rents were lower. That was the key.
There, finally, he found what he was looking for.
Or rather, what, at the time, he thought he was looking for.
The address read 1475 Greensward Lane, Tamarind Valley, California.
CHAPTER TWO
The place wasn’t much to look at, but for once the price was right. More than right, in fact. It was perfect.
The house was snug, in better repair than some he had looked at, true, and it was small but adequate. It sat well back from the street, half hidden by trees and over-grown brush years past their prime.
The rental agent, ludicrously if innocuously named Mr. Cleveland Brown and sporting a personality to match, seemed nervous. He hemmed and hawed (as Nick’s grandmother would have said) as he slipped his key into the security lock, turned it effortlessly, and pushed the front door open. Even after the two of them entered the living room and Nick looked around at the emptiness, mentally furnishing it with his hand-me-down sofa and nicked end tables (currently in a rent-by-the-month storage unit), Brown kept glancing furtively from one corner to the another, as if there were something desperately wrong at 1475 Greensward. As if there were armies of termites hiding just out of view and waiting for a chance to carry Nick away bodily to some blood-stained subterranean torture chambers; or as if the walls might someday sigh as one and fall into a pile of rubble the first time a prospective tenant sneezed.
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