by Dana Cameron
I heard a faint click.
My car was now unlocked. I was sure that I’d locked it before I went into the coffee shop. I always locked it.
I tried locking the car, with the remote that I’d found in the coffee shop.
It locked. The alarm armed.
I walked around the car, ascertaining that it was in fact mine. There was my WELL-BEHAVED WOMEN SELDOM MAKE HISTORY bumper sticker and my sticker supporting the Democratic presidential ticket. In the backseat was a shovel and milk crate full of artifacts to study at home. In the front seat was my collection of empty water bottles.
I took out my keys, held one against its counterpart on the carabiner: There was no mistaking this. Somehow, the key to my car—or a copy of it—was left at CaféNation. The coffee shop I stopped by at least five times a week, where they knew my orders by heart. A key to my car, on a key chain that I’d been automatically drawn to, wanted to handle and play with from the first moment I’d seen it.
I now had no doubt that the rest of the keys would fit the locks to my house.
The charm was another matter. I didn’t go for good luck pieces, I didn’t naturally gravitate to Irish emblems, though there were those in my family who made more of the Irish part of our heritage than I did. That was the only thing that was inconsistent at the moment.
I examined the charm again, and was struck by the same impressions that I had the first time I handled it. The enamel was dark green and beautifully made, the gold showed no scratches, no signs of wear at all, and the stone at the center of the leaves was probably a real, cut diamond. Brand new.
I turned it over and saw that there were initials on three of the leaves: “EJF.”
My initials.
Someone had the keys to my car. Had the keys to the house. Might not know the alarm codes, but had, at one point, most likely been inside the house.
Sometime later, my shovel scraped hard against a rock; the screech of metal on the rock jarred me. I looked around: I was in a shadowy, wooded area. The smell of pine needles, sap, and fresh dirt—a new note in the musty perfume of the woods—filled the still air. Just beyond the blade of the shovel I saw a hole in the ground, nearly filled; a small, scattered pile of dirt was beside it. I was sweating hard in spite of the shade and it felt like I’d been at work for a while. My hands were blistering—apparently I hadn’t been using good form—and there was dirt jammed deep under my nails. I looked down and saw my trowel stuck into the ground like a dagger. I wasn’t exactly certain where I was or how I’d gotten there. I recalled the visit to the coffee shop. I had driven here, I don’t know how. Muscle memory or instinct or dumb good luck got me there. I didn’t really remember anything. Hardly knew where I was.
A moment later and I recognized that I was beneath the trees at the far corner of our property. If I stretched, I could just make out the back of the barn, and I was far enough in that I couldn’t see or be seen from the house or street. A chill took me as I began to re-excavate the hole I had been filling. The soil was still soft and so the work was easy. I still had to work half bent over to avoid the low branches. Cedars and pines that looked so soft to the touch jabbed and scratched my head and arms.
The hole got smaller as I went down, but at least I was no longer constrained by the lattice of roots knotted under the earth; I’d cut through them the first time. When it got so that I couldn’t move dirt with the shovel, I threw that aside and pulled out the trowel. That got me another few inches, the hole narrowing even more quickly now. My shirt stuck to me, broken twigs and leaves hung on to my shirt, and more dirt wedged under my fingernails.
I found the keys from the coffee shop, just where I’d buried them, and dusted them off as best I could. Then I refilled the hole, scattering the duff of dead leaves and pine needles over the top. It was almost as though I’d never been there at all.
The car was in the driveway, I was relieved to see. After I replaced the tools in the garage, I went into the house. I didn’t bother locking the door; there didn’t seem to be a point. I dropped the carabiner and keys onto the counter, then went upstairs. I stripped down and got into the shower. I don’t know how long I was in there, but after a while I realized that I could barely breathe for the steam and my skin had gone bright red and pruney. I got out and pulled on some shorts and a jog-bra, then sat in my office.
I sat for a long time before I realized that I’d forgotten to turn on the fans. I was sweating again. I drank a whole bottle of tepid water, and then looked for another one.
The charm was a present, I understood that now. Tony’d been sending tokens or expensive presents to everyone—flowers, chocolates, photos—and now gold jewelry for me. The shamrock wasn’t my taste, but I thought that was just a good guess. What really bothered me was that he knew how much I’d like the carabiner.
Does the fact that I realized what Tony was doing, that this was a gift, mean something? Did it mean that I was starting to think like him? Or was I just so weirded out that I was reading too much into things? How could I tell what was real anymore?
I didn’t want to think that I was right. I didn’t want to think like Tony. I didn’t want to do things and then not remember them. That was crazy.
I shivered and felt myself break out into a sweat again.
Brian came home shortly after that. One look at my face, and he was at my side.
“What is it?”
I told him about the key chain and the car. I showed him the charm.
“Okay, this is bad,” he said. “But nothing’s happened to you?”
I shivered, shook my head.
“That’s something.” He looked at the key ring more closely. “Why is there so much dirt on them? Maybe that’s a clue—”
“No. It’s not.”
He looked at me sharply. “Why not?”
“I…I dropped them.” I couldn’t tell Brian about the time I’d lost. “My hands were shaking…after I tried the keys on my car. And we can forget about fingerprints, too; everyone at CaféNation will have handled them by now. What do we do?” My hands were still trembling, I felt like I had flu.
“Call the locksmith, call the cops. Check the house.”
I nodded numbly, my arms wrapped around myself. Nolan, the keys, it felt like I couldn’t even think straight, couldn’t keep a thought in my head long enough to act on it.
Brian made the calls. He found me a glass of water, and then sat down and waited with me. Suddenly, he looked up.
“The spare keys!”
I looked up; the rack by the back door where we kept the spare keys seemed to be much the same as ever. Brian rushed over in excitement, though.
“Look, they’ve been rearranged!” He picked through the keys, put them back the way that our system required. “They’ve been moved so that you can’t tell a couple have been taken! That’s how he got into the barn when it was padlocked! There’s no valet key for the car! It’s okay!”
“What do you mean, it’s okay?” I felt more exposed than ever. “My God, Brian! Tony’s got a copy of our keys!”
“Right, but he only had time enough to grab a couple, rearrange them so we wouldn’t notice right away, and maybe that’s when he grabbed the mail with Sophia’s picture on the way out. Because we’ve used the alarm every other time, we know he hasn’t been into the house since then. So if Alfie—”
“Artie.”
“—whatever—wasn’t gone for too long, that was the only time he could have gotten into the house!”
I slumped forward in the chair. “I guess I don’t see why that makes it okay.”
“It means that it wasn’t magic, how Tony or whoever got in here. And I’m happy to move one more step toward demystifying all of this. It’s logical, and we can contain it. We also know that it isn’t any worse than changing the locks, getting someone to check out the car.”
I wasn’t so sure. If nothing else, I knew I’d be cleaning the whole house as soon as I could, just to wipe away the taint of someone having been in there.
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The locksmith came, and didn’t overcharge us too badly, considering. The police came, and took a statement, took the key chain, and I gave them a copy of the rest of the file I’d been compiling about what had been going on.
I didn’t sleep a wink that night and every noise seemed to be cause for fear. Sometime around dawn, I drifted off, only to wake up to the alarm clock a few minutes later. “I’m sleeping in,” I mumbled. “I’ll go in later.”
“I’m calling in sick,” Brian announced from the other side of the bed.
“Why?” I sat up. “What’s wrong? Do you have a fever?”
“Nope. I’m fine. I’m going to stay home and we’re going to fart around today and pretend we’re normal. It’ll be the best thing for you.”
“Your deadline—”
“Can wait a day. I’ll work late or bring something home with me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Why, don’t you want me here?”
“Let me get another three hours of sleep and I’ll show you how much.”
We did virtually nothing that day. Well, to be fair, we cleaned, did laundry, went food shopping, and went out for lunch and breakfast—I had pancakes at both and not only did I eat most of it, I started picking at Brian’s french fries as well. For some reason, pretending to be normal helped a lot. Fake it until you make it.
The next day, Brian left for work, and I sat in my home office because it went against every fiber in my being to leave the Funny Farm. Now it was Brian who pointed out that there was no way we should let anyone get in the way of our lives more than they already were. We’d done all we could to remove access to the house, and we’d probably even done it in time.
I might as well go to work, I reasoned, at last: It didn’t help much that I still felt haunted, even at home. And it felt like everywhere I went there was some reminder that I was being harrowed. Work, home, the coffee shop…I realized that I was avoiding places I usually went, trying to stay holed up, out of danger, always on the alert. At home, every time the phone rang, I jumped; the doorbell, when the letter carrier showed up with a package for me, almost sent me to the moon. I caught Minnie staring at the closet and it took me a good five minutes of listening for noises before getting the poker and opening the door. Quasi came shooting out, howling indignantly about having been shut in. Nothing could just be what it was, it was all freighted with the promise of doom.
But when I got to school, I found I stumbled through my new lectures and moved through the familiar ones like a zombie. It seemed as though my arduous workouts with Temple were the only thing that gave me an hour’s precious respite.
It was a crappy way to live. I knew that I’d been avoiding a lot of things lately, deliberately not going to my favorite places, lest they be next on the chopping block. Brian was right, I was avoiding life. So I gave myself a goal, that afternoon, after work, to go to the liquor store to get some beer, then drop off the books I’d promised Raylene almost three weeks ago.
Was this what it felt like when you were losing your mind?
It took a long time to get myself together, changed, bag, keys. It took a physical effort to will myself to do something so simple, and I almost decided to postpone it for the next day, on my way to work.
But that was nuts; I shook myself. It was simple. A six pack. A quick stop by the restaurant to drop off the books. There was nothing sinister, nothing overwhelming about any of that, but faced with the prospect, it still took me about a half hour of dawdling before I got into the car.
I waited too long to pull onto Lawton’s main drag—too busy searching for the fake police car that had chased me, despite the fact I knew it was gone—and someone honked at me. It wasn’t an impatient honk, just a little tap of the horn, a woof, to let me know I should stop woolgathering, but the adrenaline almost launched me into orbit.
Take a pill, Em, I told myself. Maybe it had come to that….
I pulled into the Yacht Club’s parking lot, which was empty. That made me try to remember what day it was—I kept losing track of time in the past weeks—but I knew that it was Friday. Something must be wrong; Lawton Yacht Club was one of the most popular places around and should be just gearing up this time of a weekend night. The closed sign was visible from the edge of the parking lot, but I figured I’d just try the back door, and if no one was in, leave the books for the kids there with a note.
The door opened even as I raised my hand to knock. Tiny Raylene was pale, her eyes wide.
“Emma…how did you know?”
“What do you mean? Know what? I just came over to drop off the books I told you about. For the kids. What’s going on?”
She shook her head, her long black hair was knotted in a big braid. “I was just about to call you, tell you to come over.”
“Raylene, what’s wrong?”
“I’m telling people that we had a problem with the electric, we’re closed tonight.”
“Telling people?”
She hugged herself, and looked away. “Do you trust me? Trust Erik?”
“Uh. Yeah, I do.” And the funny thing was, I did trust them, despite our slight acquaintance. We knew them from the bar, of course, and we’d gone out on their boat with them and other guests a couple of times. They weren’t our best friends—it was too soon for that—but my instincts told me that they were okay.
She nodded. “I need you to go down to the docks, meet Erik. Something’s…happened. Happening. I think between the two of you, we’ll get some answers.”
The skin of my scalp prickled. Oh God, no. “Okay. Can you tell me what it is?”
She hesitated before she said, “It’s serious.”
I swallowed. “I get that. Where’s Erik? Is he okay?”
“Everyone’s fine, as far as I know. There was a man here. He came in the back and attacked me—no, I’m okay! The kids are fine, and so is Erik. But Emma, he had a picture of your house and one of the bar with him. His license said his name was Tony Markham.”
“What!”
“Do you know the name?”
“Raylene, he’s the guy who’s been…I think he shot my friend, Nolan! Is he here?”
Her face was a blank. “No, Erik has him. Down at the boat.”
“Why on earth—?”
Still, Raylene’s face gave nothing away. “You need to see Erik. Take our truck, it’s out back, and no one will think anything of it if they see it going down to the harbor. We’re always going out to the boat.”
“Right.” Then I frowned. “What did Erik drive?”
“He…he took another car.” She nodded, tight lipped, and I knew she wouldn’t say anything more.
“I’ll take the truck.”
Raylene nodded, turned, and led me through the dining room, out through the kitchen, to a back hallway. She handed me the keys to the truck, and handed me a coat, too. Probably one of Erik’s, as it was too big, but one of Raylene’s wouldn’t have fit me in a million years. “Gonna be cold out on the water.”
“I’m going out on the water?”
“Yes. Emma, please hurry. Erik will tell you everything.” She opened the back door, anxious to have me on my way.
I hesitated again, shrugged and nodded, pulled on the coat, and rolled up the sleeves and got into the truck. It took me a minute to rearrange the mirrors and find the lights, but I was down at the harbor five minutes later. My heart was pounding fit to burst out of my chest. I was at a loss to explain what was going on, and Raylene’s strange orders truly scared me, but if there was any chance that Tony was there…
Erik was down there, as advertised, and he looked like grim death. Erik is medium height, and doesn’t look like anything special, but something about his eyes is hard and watchful and I get the impression that hitting him would be like punching a pallet of cement blocks. Close-cropped hair that made me think he’d never gotten over the habit from the navy, and a blurry tattoo on his arm that might also be a souvenir of those years. He has a hint of a mustache
and chin whiskers that are never quite shaved, never fully grown in, and makes him look youthful. But there’s a hardness to his face that speaks of experience. He walks with a rolling gait, whether from some injury or too many years on deck, at sea, I don’t know.
Usually he’s in the background of things, quiet, happy to let Raylene run the show with the customers. Once, however, some drunk mouthed off when she told him she was calling a cab. Things escalated and he smashed a glass. Erik came out of nowhere. The guy was outside before anyone could move to help Erik, and people who were there swear that the next noise they heard was the guy’s head bouncing off the outside wall of the bar. When they came back in, Erik frog-marched the drunk up to the bar, where he stammered an apology to Raylene, and then asked her to call an ambulance. Erik made him wait outside so that Raylene didn’t have to clean up anything else besides the glass.
I learned from that incident that Erik’s nickname, “the Red,” came not from his hair color, his politics, or his bank account.
It was his temper. Quiet or no, no one screwed around with Erik twice.
He extended his hand to me; it was rough, knotted, and strong. “Emma. Thanks for coming so quick.”
“I just showed up at the restaurant, Raylene said she was going to call. What is all this?”
He shook his head. “Wait until we get out a ways.”
We went down to his dinghy. After I hopped in, he cast off, and we were off. Erik is one of the smoothest, strongest rowers I know, and we cut across the water swiftly, more quietly than I could have imagined. The lights from the docks diminished as we moved out toward his boat, Belle Jeanne-Marie, and we were nearly in darkness.
“Now?”
“Noise carries too easily. Let’s get under way.”
We tied up, and I hopped onto the deck of the cabin cruiser. Erik flicked on the running lights, and got us under power. We motored out a ways beyond the breakwater, and up the coast a little bit. Then he cut the power and we were nearly in silence. The coast above Lawton is sparsely populated and most folks would have been watching television about now, not looking at us, had they been there to see us. Pity; if I had that view, in one of those houses, I would be staring out the window, myself.