by Tim McGregor
“Yeah.” He looked at her funny. “Why?”
“I dunno. Just that nonsense with Berryhill. Didn’t that rile you? I wanted to kill him.”
“Bill’s a jackass who likes attention,” he said, splashing water over his face. “He’s not worth getting upset about.”
Emma scrubbed her teeth furiously the way she did, her hand still on his back. Her fingers strayed to the scar on his shoulder blade and, without thinking, traced its contours. She felt him flinch, knowing he didn’t like it being touched. Sometimes she couldn’t help herself, the way one puts a finger to a freshly painted wall, just to see if it’s dry. The scar he dismissed as a childhood accident but never elaborated further. Same with the bent finger on his right hand.
He dried his face, kissed her hair while she brushed like mad. Her palm slid to the small of his back and he felt her fingertips dip into his skin. A little firmer than the usual goodnight squeeze. He looked for her eyes but she was already dipping under the tap to rinse.
He swung into bed trying to decipher the fingertips. Was there a chance of them getting friendly or was it just the slow burnoff of a few pints? No matter how tired he was, even the slightest hint of sex woke him wide. Especially spontaneous schoolnight shenanigans. Jim scolded himself for getting his hopes up and reached for the paperback on his nightstand. Flipping back a few pages, trying to remember the plot to this potboiler. A ‘Walking Tall’ actioner about a war vet who returns home to find his neighbourhood overrun by Russian dope dealers. Or were they terrorist sleepers masking as dope peddlers? He scanned the back copy blurb, trying to orient the plot when Emma came into the room and peeled off her clothes.
A nightly ritual, one he’d seen a thousand thousand times but he always lowered his book to watch. Didn’t matter how tired or how not in the mood he felt, he always looked. Emma was stunning stark naked, despite every self conscious guffaw she gave when he told her so. She wasn’t a kid anymore. Neither of them were. Gone was the flat stomach and unblemished skin. She had a little potbelly and a few lingering stretch marks. Having a baby would do that but it didn’t diminish her in any way. The opposite in fact. It suited her and she wore it well. Like all the little scars she had crisscrossed against her flesh. The little misadventures of everyday life, tiny hatch marks that ran against the grain of her curves, accentuating them all the more.
He watched her pull on a threadbare T-shirt with a faded logo that barely read Dinosaur Jr. She slipped under the covers and fumbled for the book on her night table. They read for a few minutes, their legs touching. She yawned and he realized he had misread her earlier touch, misgauged her temperature. They closed their books and switched off the lights.
She curled into him, her palm flat against his chest and now all he could think about was her. Sleep chased away by her warmth, her body pressed into his. He was hard and it wasn’t going away anytime soon. How long had it been anyway? A week?
His hand scooped down the small of her back and pulled her closer. Touching his lips to her brow. A long shot but she responded. Her leg curled tight into his and her breath steamed against the skin of his throat.
She was hungry too.
4
THE STRANGER ROLLED into town early that Wednesday morning. A tabby perched in a window watched the vehicle trundle past, the sole witness to his arrival. The sky was grey in the predawn light, the streets empty. Rumbling slow down Galway Road like a tourist, taking in the sights of the sleeping storefronts and eerie stillness. Newspaper tumbleweeds.
The vehicle, a boxy Toyota FJ cruiser with a roofrack of floodlights, hewed up before the granite steps of the town hall. Parked in the handicap space right out front. The stranger swung out and looked over the building. He took the steps two at a time to read the hours printed on the front door. Two hours to kill before the county office opened for business.
A small poster in the window advertised the upcoming Heritage Festival. He skimmed the bullet points detailing a marching band, memorial commemoration and a classic car show in the park. A midway and softball games. Family fun for all. “Perfect,” he said.
He went down the steps and crossed into the middle of the empty street. Every window was dark, no welcoming neon sign calling out to early risers. Even the cat had disappeared from the sill.
And then miraculously, a light went on. A diner, half a block away, coming to life. A neon sign flickering and warming until it glowed a single word beacon. COFFEE.
The stranger leaned and spit onto the sidewalk, then climbed back into his vehicle.
~
Martin Gallagher sat on a cracked leather stool, the only patron of the Oak Stem diner. Shoulders hunched over the counter, warming his big knuckled hands around the coffee cup. A morning ritual, one the starting cook knew and accepted. Old man Gallagher lingering outside the door at six, waiting to be let in like some errant tomcat. Whether the old man woke at an ungodly hour or hadn’t gone to bed at all was a matter of conjecture among the staff. His nights spent at the Dublin pub, closing out the place at last call and showing up at the diner when the cook started his shift at six. Some believed the man never slept at all, or slept sitting up on his stool. Little catnaps between conversations over a whiskey or cup of joe. Lack of sleep would explain the old fool’s habit of muttering to himself or, unprovoked, barking obscenities to the room.
This morning no different from any other. The cook prepping for the morning rush and the old man content to sit and watch the empty street. Mumbling into his cup, occasionally turning around to bellow at the empty booths. That’s more of what ye owe me, ye son-of-whoor!
So, when the bell over the door chimed, both the cook and the old man startled.
The stranger looked up at the bells dangling on the trim and smiled, charmed by it. He took a stool at the counter, nodded to Gallagher and then turned to the cook. “Coffee please.”
The cook grimaced, disliking the upset to his routine. He clattered a cup onto the counter, filled it and went back to cubing potatoes.
Gallagher scrutinized the newcomer, closing one eye to take a proper measure. His eyes mistrustful, bloodshot as they were. No, no one he recognized.
“You all right, grampa?” The stranger leaned close to return the stare. Clapped the pensioner on the back. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”
“Do I know ye?” Gallagher shrugged, answering his own query. “I don’t know ye.”
“Aha. Awake and astute.”
“Ye passing through?”
“No. I’m here.”
Gallagher’s lips soured, deciding immediately the man was an idiot. “No, I mean are ye driving through? On your way somewhere? London, I’ll bet.”
“No. This is Pennyluck, isn’t it?” He swept a hand over the room, as if the diner encompassed the town. “But I am confused on one matter. Maybe you can help. Is this the asshole of the world or just the armpit?”
“Eh?”
“Either will do, I reckon.” He clinked his cup against the old man’s. “Refill?”
Gallagher’s eyes narrowed to rheumy slits. “Ye fucker. That’s more of what ye owe me.”
The cook stopped chopping, the blade hovering over the onions. He looked over his shoulder to see the stranger’s reaction. The man was grinning away, like he couldn’t be more pleased. The cook looked away when the man caught him peeking.
“Could you pour me one to go?” He stood, clapped the old man on the back again. “Think I’ll take in the sights.”
A takeout cup was poured. The stranger dropped a five on the counter and nodded at the old man. Said he was buying the round and left, laughing as the door chimes rang.
Gallagher wrinkled his gin-blossomed nose. “Jesus. Do you smell that? Like something burnt?”
The cook looked to his sizzling grill. “I’m not burning anything.”
“No. Him. That smell.” The old man tinkled his fingernails against the vermiculite countertop. “Sulphur or something. Can’t you smell it?”
The cook
pointed the spatula at his nose. “I can’t smell anything.”
The old man rattled his fingers some more. “Not sulphur. What’s the word…”
The cook went back to his grill. Gallagher corkscrewed his lips, shaking his foggy memory until the word fell out. He snapped his fingers.
“Brimstone.”
~
Emma stood at the sink, looking sleepily out the window. The sun coming up over the trees, burning off the dew as the shadows receded. Jim already up and gone like every morning but not before brewing a fresh pot for when she woke. She was still at the sink when he came in and pressed up behind her. Hands wrapping under her ribs, kissing her tangled hair. She leaned back into him, her head notching into his shoulder.
“Did you sleep okay?” He slid around her and washed up at the sink. Emma had trouble sleeping sometimes, waking deep in the night and unable to fall back under. Exhausted and spent for the new day. He himself slept like the dead no matter what.
“Yeah.” She gave him a shy smirk, like they shared a secret. “Very well.”
“Where’s Travis?” Jim looked to the empty table and then his watch.
“Getting the paper.”
He sat down and she slid a mug of coffee onto the table just as the screen door banged shut. A sound Jim hated, knowing one day the bang would be the old door’s last. The house was set well back from the road and it was Travis’s job to go get the paper stuffed into their mailbox. He rode his bike out to fetch it and every morning let the screen door bang the frame no matter how many times he’d been told not to.
Travis dropped the paper onto the table, reached for the cereal box and was already pouring cereal before he noticed his dad watching him. “Sorry.”
“That door is just gonna fall right off the hinges you keep banging it like that.”
Emma brought the milk and Travis poured and ate noisily. Halfway through the bowl, he looked up. “What’s going on next door?”
Jim lowered the front page. There was no next door, their closest neighbour was a quarter mile away. “What?”
“Did someone buy that crappy old house?”
The crappy old house. It took a second before Jim understood what he meant. The derelict farmhouse on the property next to theirs, a crumbling tinderbox so old that Jim didn’t even see it anymore. Part of the landscape, no more visible than the weeping willows that surrounded the place.
Travis clocked the confusion on both their faces. “The haunted house. Up the road.” Travis had called it a haunted house since he was five. To Jim’s knowledge, the boy had never gone near it, death-trap that it was.
“What do you mean, honey?” Emma sat down, hands drawing warmth from her mug.
Travis poured a second bowl. “Some dude’s over there. Tossing junk out on the front yard.
Jim pushed his chair back and went to the window. He knew full well that the old house wasn’t visible from this window but he went and looked all the same. Nothing. Trees, the old fence.
“Did you recognize him?” Emma asked.
“No.”
“Maybe the town’s decided to finally pull it down.”
Jim crossed to the backdoor and slipped his boots back on. “I doubt that. Probably just some junk collector. I’ll go see.”
“I want to come.” Travis, already on his feet.
“Stay here.”
~
Jim climbed under the wheel and rumbled down the driveway to the road. A fly bounced inside the windshield before being sucked out the open window. Trespassers weren’t uncommon on the old property, usually antique hunters from the city. Sometimes just kids looking to explore. The old Corrigan house was big and spooky-looking, a natural draw for any curious eyes driving past. Two years ago it was some college kids with a bunch of weird gear. Said they were ghost hunters searching for signs of paranormal activity. Jim had chased them off, telling them they were trespassing and he’d call the cops if they didn’t pack up and skedaddle.
The driveway to the old place was nothing more than two rutted tracks of hard packed clay. Overgrown crabgrass trailed beneath the pickup’s undercarriage. Jim could already see a vehicle parked in the front yard. A new Toyota FJ, tricked out with floodlights on the roof and a heavy grille guard. Long way from home too. Nova Scotia plates. Another antique hunter.
An ambitious one at that, Jim thought. There was a tidy pile of trash and debris just off the veranda, hauled from inside and pitched out. Jim went up the rotted plank steps and stopped outside the open door.
“Hello?”
No response. A dull crash deep inside the house.
The interior was dark and musty smelling. An overturned chair to his left, the spindles splayed and broken. A table against the wall with a yellowing calendar hung over it, forever frozen to June 1973. A rack of stag antlers over a wide stone hearth. The floorboards warped and filthy with the dry bones of mice and other small creatures. The staircase and the hallway to the back. He hollered again.
Noise thudding through the floor. A shatter of glass and the tinkling of shards. Jim passed under the staircase to the hallway, the light brightening into what was once the kitchen.
A silhouette in the room, the man a blur against the sunlight squaring the grimy windows. His back to Jim. Rubble at his feet and dust frosting the air. An iron poker in his hand.
“Hello.”
The voice was low and unfamiliar. He didn’t turn around.
Jim’s back went up, wary. He reminded himself the man was a trespasser. And a vandal, judging by the damage he’d wrought with the poker. Jim dropped an octave, injecting authority into his tone. “Can I help you with something? This is private property.”
“Private?” The man finally turned. Jim ballparked his age at forty or so, the features deeply etched. Eyes that bored into Jim’s and wouldn’t let go. Big shoulders and raw looking hands. “It looks like it’s been used as a public toilet,” he said.
“It’s been empty a long time. You scavenging for antiques or something?”
The stranger sized Jim up and down but said nothing. Locking that weird stare onto him. Creepy was the word that sprang to mind. “Couple places in town for antiques. Regular shops instead of trespassing.” Jim stressed the trespassing part, impatient to hustle this weirdo on his way.
“No trespasser here, sir.” The man grinned wide, like someone clutching a flush. “Except you maybe.”
“Beg your pardon?”
The man passed the iron rod from his right hand to his left and stepped closer. “You live next door, yeah? What’s your name?” He thrust his hand out to shake.
“Jim. Jim Hawkshaw.” Without thinking, taking the hand and shaking.
“Will Corrigan.” The man pumped Jim’s hand. Watched his face for a reaction.
Jim creased his brow, the name bouncing around inside his head but not making any sense. Corrigan. That’s the name of this derelict tinderbox. The ‘old Corrigan place’. A term he’d heard since he was a kid but never stopped to ask what it meant or who the Corrigans were. Like asking who Santa Claus was. It just was.
“Corrigan?” Jim stumbled over the name, saying it aloud. “No, that’s the name of this place. Or it used to be—”
Will Corrigan squeezed Jim’s hand. “The very same. Pleased to meet you, Jim.”
Jim pulled his hand away. Something didn’t add up, he thought. There are no Corrigans.
“I’ve come to claim the family homestead. Or at least what’s left of the fucking place.” Corrigan tossed the poker to the floor where it crashed against a mess of broken plates. “Guess that makes us neighbours.”
~
“Get outta here! Shoo!”
The damn goats. Emma chased the pair of them from her vegetable garden, where they had devoured the tomato shoots and the flowering bell peppers. The slat fence Jim had put up to keep them out lay trampled in the dirt. Unlike horses, goats didn’t spook and bolt. The goats, whom Jim had named It and Shit, just worked their jaws and watched her
bellow with their slit eyes. A swift kick to the hind end and the animals brayed and meandered off slowly. Plodding to the weed border of the yard and nipping at the clover, looking back at her with what Emma could only read as resentment.
“You two can be sold,” she scolded them. “In a heartbeat.”
The goats lowered their heads and chewed, turning their behinds towards her.
Emma kneeled down to inspect the damage. The tomatoes might survive but the peppers would never bear fruit now, the stalks devoured up along with the buds. She brushed her hands off and straightened up, catching sight of the pickup roaring onto the road and pluming dust as it steered towards town.
Where the hell was Jim going?
She dug her phone from a back pocket and hit the number for Jim’s cell.
“Yeah.” His voice crackly down the line.
“Where are you going?” Emma strode out of the rows, angling the phone for a better reception. “Is everything okay?”
“I gotta talk to Kate. Somebody just screwed us over.”
Click. The line gone dead. She hated it when he got cryptic. Was she supposed to guess what that meant?
To hell with it. Emma knelt back down to uproot the mangled pepper plants.
5
THE OAK STEM Diner was the place where business was conducted over eggs and bottomless cups of coffee, had been since the sixties. Business had slackened the last few years when the new Tim Hortons coffee shop landed further out on the strip, siphoning off customers but the Oak Stem held its own with its booths and swivel stools. A universal truth; you couldn’t negotiate a deal under a sign declaring a twenty minute minimum.
The bell over the door rang as Jim entered but staff and patrons alike were deaf to it now. Jim scanned the tables and spotted Kate in the last booth. Sitting across from her were Hitchens and Tom Carswell, the manager of the Pennyluck Savings and Loan. All three looked up when Jim approached.
Jim nodded to the two men before squaring his eyes on the mayor. “We need to talk.”