by Jim Heskett
Baby on the way, wife going to be out of work for weeks or months, was I crazy to turn down a job, even if it meant moving here? What if Grace decided she didn’t want to go back to work? How long could we get by on our savings and unemployment checks?
What if I couldn’t find another job for months?
The tension in my neck and jaw returned as I opened the door. There was no geisha girl waiting for me, instead only an icy cold room. Cleaning people, most likely, had cranked up the air conditioner and left it on when they finished.
I turned it off, slipped under the bed’s down comforter, and took out my phone. Composed a new text to Grace.
Wyatt made another run at me. Not happy my answer is still no.
The little dots danced across the screen, meaning she was composing her reply. I waited at least two minutes for the response.
Hey honey! Just got done with my swim class and now I’m going to settle in with a book.
That made me sit up in bed. If there was such a thing as typical Grace, that reply wasn’t it. I had no idea she was taking a swim class, and I’d never known her to be much of a reader. Plenty of reality television, maybe a magazine or two here and there, but a book?
I wrote back:
Swim class?
No reply came back this time, so I tapped on her contact record to call her. No answer. I stared at the phone, waiting for another text. A few moments later, she wrote back:
Oh, silly me, I meant spin class. Fat-fingered it.
And that was all. Fat fingered? Seemed like a strange phrase for my wife to use. Maybe she was finally getting that pregnancy brain thing I’d heard people mention.
I tried to call her again, and still she didn’t pick up. Not that it was unusual for her to be unreachable by phone, but I was quite curious to find out what book could have possibly caught her interest so much that she’d decide to actually read one.
When I tried to sleep that night, it seemed like a pointless exercise. Left side didn’t work. Right side didn’t work. On my back didn’t work. I think I must have caught a few minutes somewhere because I had a slim memory of a dream about spiders bursting out of cracks in the walls. I wasn’t crazy about spiders, so I didn’t rush back to sleep after a dream like that.
At around four, I decided to give up and review my training slides for the day. I helped myself to an orange juice and a muffin from the mini-fridge, and watched the sun rise over the highways and glass buildings of Las Colinas. Grace still hadn’t returned my call.
CHAPTER FIVE
Since the hotel was only a couple blocks from the office, I decided to walk there. I wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing in summer when the temps rarely dipped below triple digits, but the air felt cool and the sun was shining and I felt like walking off a bit of the tension I’d accumulated in my body, not being able to sleep so well. Spider dreams. Is there anything worse?
I tried to call Grace, but she didn’t pick up. Again. Texted her to call me as soon as possible. I felt that tension creep into the back of my neck, but told myself I was overreacting, because it was normal to go a few days without talking to her when on these trips.
The walk to the office only took a couple of minutes, and I listened to some mellow Iron & Wine songs to ease into the morning. Something about those singer-songwriters made me nostalgic for events I’d never experienced.
Then I stopped short when I saw something I hadn’t expected to see: Darren, my bushy-eyebrowed, evil-eyed trainee, in a tie and slacks, digging in a dumpster. The dumpster was at the end of the office lot. He had one hand over the edge, fishing around, and in a few moments, he withdrew the hand, holding a small object. He touched it, and then held it up to his ear. I was at least a thousand feet away, but I was almost positive he was holding a phone.
I ducked back behind a telephone pole but kept my eyes on him. He spoke for about thirty seconds, then glanced left and right. I made sure I was hidden, as well as I could be behind a foot-wide pole. Eventually, he put the phone back into the dumpster, but he didn’t toss it. He placed it carefully before brushing off his nice clothes as he walked away.
A chill ran down my spine. Not that dumpster-diving was so weird, but a guy in a tie, taking something out, then putting it back in the dumpster? I’m sure he had his own cell phone, so grabbing one out of the dumpster was about the strangest thing I could imagine.
I watched him as I crossed the parking lot. He sat down on the steps in front of the building and tightened the laces of his shoes. Maybe he was just pretending with the shoelace act. Maybe he’d seen me watching him and wanted to explain himself before I went inside.
My heart thumped against my ribcage as he looked up into my eyes. I felt silly. Even if Kareem’s warning had been real, why should I be so frightened about some weirdo dumpster-diving kid?
“Morning, Mr. Candle.”
I stopped short of the stairs and hitched my backpack up over my shoulder. “Morning, Darren. You can just call me Candle. The mister isn’t necessary.”
“If you say so, sir. We were told when y’all came down from the Denver office that we were supposed to show you the utmost respect, though, so I’m just trying to be polite.”
“I see. You waiting for some particular reason to go into the building?”
He sucked on his teeth before answering. “Not really. Are you?”
His words were like daggers. Compared to me, he was just a kid, but I couldn’t shake the creeping sense of dread that tickled the back of my neck when I talked with him.
I shook my head and walked past him. He jumped to his feet. Followed me inside, staying only about two feet behind me all the way to the training room. I could have sworn I felt his breath on the back of my neck.
“How is your hotel? They get you something nice?”
“It’s fine,” I said, not turning around to answer. “I’m going to get some coffee, so I’ll see you in there.”
“No problem,” he said as we parted ways.
Today we were covering the theme builder section of the Design software, the module that guides users through setting the look and feel of their website. Keisha and Paul picked it up quickly, asked all the right questions, made great-looking demo sites in no time at all. Martin struggled a bit and I had to devote a lot of time to helping him get a decent demo started. Darren, though, sat in the back and didn’t say a word. Eyes on me, all day long. Hardly even seemed to blink. He didn’t ask any questions, just emailed me his work, which was perfect. As if he already knew all about the theme builder.
Since today was going to be such a packed day, I’d put my phone on vibrate, but it had died at some point. Hadn’t checked it in a couple hours. As we were wrapping up, I plugged it in and powered it on, expecting to see at least one voicemail from my wife.
Instead, Grace had sent me a single text message:
This book is amazing! I can’t wait until you come home so I can tell you all about it.
CHAPTER SIX
Waiting for the shuttle to take me back to the airport, I called Grace one more time. Hadn’t spoken to her all week long, and her text messages sounded like computer-generated spam emails, the kind that approximate human language but don’t make any sense. Maybe there was truth to the whole pregnancy brain thing. I imagined coming home to milk on the coffee table and the remote control in the fridge.
My last night in Dallas, I’d texted my neighbor, who told me he had seen her car there off and on all week, but she didn’t seem to be home now.
I stood at the rental car hub at D-F-Dubya, waiting for the number 3 shuttle. Tourists with rolling bags and businessmen in suits paraded around me. The tourists tugged little children by the hand. The businessmen stared deeply into the screens of their phones.
My phone buzzed. My aunt again. If she was calling about Dad, as her earlier text indicated, I still didn’t want to hear it. I had enough stress in my life right now.
After the baby was born, maybe then I’d call him. Maybe later, I�
�d even invite him to come see his grandchild. But not now.
Wyatt had taken one more run at me to get me to change my mind before I left the office that morning. I was having more and more trouble finding ways to politely tell him I wasn’t interested.
One hand held my carry on bags while the other thumped against my thigh. The music pumping through my earbuds didn’t do much to quell the anxiety coursing through my veins. My flight left in an hour, and then I would be home in my beloved Colorado, away from overbearing Wyatt and creepy Darren and all of Texas.
When the shuttle pulled up, a somber man in a uniform stepped out and looked me in the eyes. His lower lids were drooping like a basset hound’s, and he frowned.
“Good afternoon. Take your bag, sir?”
I thrust it toward him. “Yes, please.”
Get me out of here. Get me out of here and don’t make me come back.
***
The flight was the bumpiest I’d ever experienced in my life, as if the plane were a shaken-up bottle of soda, unleashed across the middle states of America. I noticed they didn’t have puke bags on airplanes anymore. Maybe they didn’t think they were necessary, or maybe they figured the sight of them was a bad PR message. I could have talked to a flight attendant about it, but I didn’t care enough to actually put forth the effort to ask the question.
I tried to read a book on the plane, but I kept worrying about Grace. Even though I was traveling so much the last few months, going this long without checking in was unheard of. I was sure there was a good explanation for it, but I kept drawing a blank.
When we touched down, I put away my worn Michael Chricton paperback and leaned forward in the seat, hoping I might pass a few slow people deboarding and get home that much quicker.
After the flight, I rushed through the airport and into the massive Denver International parking lot to find my car.
Cold out, and the skies looked ready to unleash snow at any moment. When the clouds grew lighter, that meant a pouring was imminent. This winter had already given us more snow than usual.
I raced out of the parking lot, not bothering to text Grace or call her. I was going to go home, she would be there, and everything would make sense. It had to. Maybe she could tell me why the hell she’d decided to take up reading for no good reason.
When I pulled into my neighborhood, I felt that sense of relief that comes from the familiar.
“Hello, house that probably makes and sells meth,” I said as I drove past the shabby house at the end of the block. “Hello, guy who collects Volkswagens. Hello, woman with the German Shepherd that barks at me like I’m trying to break in and steal something. Hello, guy who obsessively waters his lawn while wearing bike shorts.” My neighborhood had a lot of character. Plus meth, possibly.
We lived on a pseudo-cul de sac halfway down the street. When I reached it, I saw my wife’s car in the driveway, and my neighbor Alan out front of his house, shoveling snow. Decked out in a puffy down Broncos jacket and sweatpants, he looked like an orange and blue marshmallow.
He lifted a pair of can headphones from his ears and raised a hand as I parked along the curved street. He threw a smile at me, but I scowled at him as I got out of my car.
“Why didn’t you call me?” I said, pointing at my wife’s Subaru.
His face fell. “Oh, man, I totally blanked on that. My mistake, Candle. I even put a reminder on my phone, then I forgot to look at it.”
Alan smoked a lot of weed, that was for sure. He was handy with a power saw, but not the kind of person to count on when you needed something important. I should have known better.
Since I’d been traveling so much and Grace usually was home alone, I’d hired a service to come by and shovel the snow from our driveway and off our cars the morning after every snowstorm. Her car was clean of snow, so I didn’t know if it had been driven since the last dumping.
“Hey, if Grace is home,” Alan said, “can you ask her to come over and check on my worms? I’ve got some kind of fruit fly infestation, and I’m worried they’re not going to make it.”
“Sure, no problem,” I said, but their compost bin worm project was not something I’d push up too high on my priority list.
I opened the front door, and an odd smell greeted me in the living room. I was used to coming home to the odor of curry, or barbecue, or the horrific soapy scent of cilantro. But this was something different; something stark and gritty. I couldn’t place it.
“Grace?”
No reply. Instead of my wife, our cat came tumbling down the stairs, meowing at the top of her lungs and giving me the evil eye. She was a quiet cat and only expressed such a loud affectation whenever we took off for a weekend trip. The humans were not allowed to have fun without her.
I walked into the kitchen and found her food bowl. The wet bowl was empty, as was the dry one. Why hadn’t Grace been feeding the cat?
“Grace?” I said as I opened the cupboard and took down the cat food.
Still no reply. I dumped some dry food into the bowl, which Kitty started to eat before I’d even finished pouring.
Now there was quiet, so I listened. Not sure for what, but I shut my eyes and focused on my breathing. Where could my wife have gone with her car still in the driveway?
On an impulse, I checked her Facebook account and saw she hadn’t posted any updates all week long. Now that was certainly strange.
There was no note on the fridge, or the kitchen table, or in any of the usual places we communicated. I searched the living room, the garage, and even the basement. Nothing but an empty house looked back at me.
As I gazed up the staircase to our bedroom, something came over me. A cold, spreading sense that I should not go up there. How I came to that feeling, I had no idea. But just as I had known there was something odd about supposedly-magical Kareem and creepy Darren, I knew that I didn’t want to discover whatever was upstairs.
I put a foot on the bottom step. Placed my hand on the banister.
I took each step one by one, noticing that awful gritty smell getting stronger. Kind of like rust or something metallic. I gagged a bit as it threatened to overwhelm me.
At the top of the stairs, I peeked into the bedroom. Empty. Checked the guest/baby bedroom, also empty. Only one place left to look, so I put a hand on the knob of the bathroom.
Twisted the knob. Inside, I saw blood. Dark like burgundy, pooled on the tile floor of my bathroom, running in the cracks between the tiles.
My first thought, as I stared at the body sitting on my toilet, was that’s not Grace. Thank God, it’s not Grace. Definitely not a pregnant woman. The body was that of a man, tall, with his wrists and neck slashed. Blood splattered everywhere: on the walls, on the floor, the shower curtain.
But if that wasn’t Grace, where was she?
I felt an urge either to run to the body or run away from it, but I forced myself to stay still. Breathe in, then out, gathering my thoughts and preparing a plan for what to do next.
I’d never come face to face with a dead person before. Seen plenty of movies and TV shows with carnage much worse than what was staring back at me from the spot where I brushed my teeth every morning.
But this was my first real dead body. And it was in my house, in my bathroom, on my toilet.
He was dressed in slacks and a button down shirt. He was wearing a tie, something maybe once light but was now darkened with his blood. The tie caught my eye. Something familiar about it. Did I own one like it? How creepy would that be to discover I shared a tie preference with a dead man?
The dead man’s head was slumped forward, so I kneeled to get a better look. A voice inside my head told me not to do it, to call the police immediately, but the tie hooked me. I had to know who this was in my bathroom.
I lowered myself to a crouch, then craned my neck and turned my face up so I could get a good look at the man’s head.
The world collapsed to a pinhole. The dead man on my toilet was Paul, my trainee and recent MBA grad
who was ready to kick some ass in the corporate world.
I’d seen him only ten hours ago, in a different state. Literally. Alive in Texas, and now dead in Colorado.
When I’d shaken his hand before I left, he thanked me for giving him so much information about the IntelliCraft Design software. Told me he was going to make the most of it and go places within the company. He was such a smart kid, if not one of the cockiest I’d ever met.
I noticed a piece of paper on the back of the toilet. When I unfolded it, saw this written in large block letters on the inside:
DO NOT TELL THE POLICE YOU KNOW HIM. ASK KAREEM WHY.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I stood and backed away from the bathroom, and nearly fell down the stairs when the back of my foot reached the edge. My knees went weak and I stumbled down the stairs anyway, barely managing to grip the banister for support.
Air. I needed air. None of what I’d seen made any sense, and I had to get away from it. Now.
Ask Kareem why about what?
I noticed little red paw prints on the steps leading up, trailing off as they disappeared into the baby’s room. Kitty had been exploring in the bathroom. I hadn’t noticed those before, maybe because I wasn’t expecting a river of blood to be in my house.
As I rushed outside, Alan was still shoveling snow, and he stopped to examine me. He took off his headphones and rested them on his collarbone.
“Dude, you okay?”
I stumbled toward to him, trying to keep myself from hyperventilating. “Did you… have you seen anyone parked out front of my house today? Seen anyone coming in or out at all?”