Shotgun

by Marie Sexton

  I wasn’t sure if I was disappointed or relieved.

  “I talked to Bob Bolen and Troy Fowler. They both denied any involvement. Shocking, I know. They claimed to be home sleeping like babes all night. They’re single, so there’s nobody to confirm or deny. Your neighbors didn’t see or hear anything, so I have zero evidence to compel a warrant of any kind. So basically, unless something else happens, I’ve got zilch.”

  “I appreciate the effort.”

  “You shouldn’t. It’s the least I could do. I’m kind of pissed I can’t do more.”

  “This may be a stupid question, but what about fingerprints?”

  He did me the favor of not laughing at me. “Dusting for prints makes a big mess and wastes a shitload of time and money, which my boss isn’t too keen on. There’s bound to be hundreds of prints, most of which would be worthless. And any that were usable would probably be yours.”

  “It always works on CSI.”

  He made a sound that might have been a chuckle. “Yeah, those assholes have better scriptwriters than you and me. And a way bigger budget.”

  “So, I suppose swabbing my entire car for DNA is right out?”

  “Oddly enough.”

  “It was worth a shot.”

  “Maybe next time the vandals will do us the courtesy of signing their work.”

  I wasn’t worried. Despite Officer Richards’s assurances, I was sure the vandalism had been the work of teenagers. “Thanks, Officer. But I doubt there’ll be a next time.”

  I ended the call and looked up to find Leila watching me with wide eyes.

  “What?” I asked.

  She shook her head in bemusement. “You. You’re actually smiling.”

  “I am?”

  “Like a fool.”

  The microwave dinged, and I took advantage of the opportunity to hide my face from her. Now that she’d pointed it out, I couldn’t stop grinning.

  “You met somebody!”

  “No.”

  “Is it the cop?”

  “No,” I laughed. “He’s hot, but definitely not an option.” I peeled the thin layer of plastic off the top of my lunch—burning my fingers on steam in the process, despite the warnings on the box—then took my cardboard container of noodles and mystery meat back to the table.

  Leila wasn’t dissuaded by my delay. “So?” she prompted. “What gives?”

  “Maybe I’m happy because the sun’s finally out.”

  “Nice try. It’s more than the weather. And if it isn’t the cop, it has to be the guy who picked you up yesterday.”

  “Dominic?”

  She grinned knowingly. “Is that his name?” I ducked my head and stirred my lunch, feeling as if I’d tipped my hand way too easily. “You two had quite the Kodak moment out there,” she teased.

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “Really?”

  “I hadn’t seen him in a while. That’s all.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Except you’re back to grinning like a fool again.”

  I took a bite of my lunch. It burned my mouth and tasted like salted gym socks, but at least I stopped smiling. I was trying to decide whether I dared chew it before swallowing when Bob Bolen stalked into the break room. His lunch was later than ours, so I was surprised to see him. I was even more surprised when he walked straight up to the table rather than simply scowling at Leila and me as he’d done in the past.

  “Listen, shithead,” he said, flexing his shoulders as he loomed over us. “I don’t appreciate being harassed by cops.”

  I swallowed my too-hot bite of food and did my best to look tough, even though my heart was pounding. “I don’t appreciate being harassed while I’m eating lunch, so I guess we’re even.”

  “Somebody dings your car up a bit, and you assume it’s me?”

  “No. He asked if I had any coworkers who didn’t like me, and for some strange reason, your name came up.”

  “I didn’t do a goddamn thing to your car.”

  “Then you have nothing to worry about.”

  I had a feeling he wanted to say more, but for better or worse, he wasn’t exactly eloquent. He scowled at me again and left.

  “What an asshole,” Leila said, once he was gone. “You think it was him?”

  “No,” I said, pushing the nasty lumps of my lunch around in its tray. “I’m sorry I ever gave his name to that cop.”

  On the bright side, at least nobody else could accuse me of grinning stupidly. I barely smiled again until 3:45, when I walked outside to find Dominic waiting for me. He stood in the same spot as before, although I noticed he’d driven his personal truck this time rather than the garage’s courtesy van. He waved and I waved back, ridiculously aware of Leila standing next to me, watching our interaction.

  “He’s cute,” she said.

  “Yes, he is.”

  “He looks familiar.”

  “He’s Naomi Jacobsen’s dad.”

  “Interesting. Is he single?”

  “Yep.”

  “So what the hell are you waiting for?”

  I chose not to answer.

  “I expect a full report in the morning.”

  “There won’t be anything to report.”

  “Whatever.”

  I was relieved when she turned toward her car, leaving me to greet Dominic on my own.

  The few yards to his truck felt like an eternity. My legs felt too short, my arms too long. Was I swinging my briefcase too much? Why hadn’t I checked my hair before I walked outside? The fact that I hadn’t even glanced in a mirror seemed like a foolhardy oversight. For all I knew, I had spinach in my teeth.

  “Hey,” he said when I was finally close enough to make conversation easy.

  “Hey.”

  We stood there like morons, both of us grinning. One of us needed to make a move—to simply take a chance and kiss the other one—but I saw the way he glanced at the people around us and took a step away from me.

  It didn’t matter. He was here, and an evening of playing with plastic bricks sounded a hundred times better than drinking alone. He opened the passenger door of his truck for me, and I gladly climbed inside.

  ON OUR fourth evening, we finished the Millennium Falcon.

  “They said at the store it’d take a bit to get the Death Star in,” he told me the second week after we’d found each other again, “but they had an Imperial Walker in stock.” And so we started on that next.

  I didn’t spend every night with him. About half the time, I still went home alone, although my consumption of bourbon slowed a bit. But at least twice per week, he’d call, and we’d waste an evening at his house, playing with Legos. On more than one occasion, he tried to persuade Naomi to build with us, but she staunchly refused.

  “They’re for kids, Dad,” she’d said, rolling her eyes.

  Sometimes, we spent so long chatting, we forgot to put more than a few pieces together. A couple of times, we put the Legos aside to watch a movie. One thing remained steadfast: clothes stayed on.

  I couldn’t help but wonder about his reluctance. I knew it wasn’t due to an absence of attraction. I felt his gaze on me. I saw the way he stole glances my way. I noticed how he moved closer, how he’d reach for me, but then stop himself before making contact. Those times when I rode in his old GTO with him, I felt the tension coming off of him in waves.

  At least I wasn’t the only one with issues.

  Other than the addition of Dominic to my life, everything returned to normal. His garage finished the work on my car, and I chalked the entire incident up to bored teenagers. I assumed the same teenagers were responsible for the continuing late-night phone calls. On the evenings when I forgot to silence my phone before bed, I’d wake to it ringing sometime after midnight. If I didn’t answer, they kept calling. If I did answer, it did little good. The caller never spoke.

  Bob Bolen continued to give me a wide berth at work, but that was nothing new,
and it wasn’t unwelcome. Still, I regretted having given him even more reason to dislike me.

  On Thursday of the third week, Dominic called me a bit after four, just as I was walking up the drive to my front door. I was marveling at how quickly the weather could turn. It’d been sunny all day, but now an angry wind gusted hard from the west. Thick, dark storm clouds billowed overhead. I fumbled for my phone, dropping my keys in the process. “Hello?”

  “Guess what?” Dominic said gleefully.

  “I give up.”

  “The Death Star arrived.”

  He sounded positively giddy, and I couldn’t help but laugh. I didn’t quite share his enthusiasm, but I knew we’d have fun putting the thing together. “How many pieces?”

  “Thirty-eight hundred.”

  “Wow. That’s no moon.”

  “Exactly.”

  “See you in a couple of hours, then?” I asked.

  “Well, no. That’s why I’m calling, actually. Naomi has this thing tonight.”

  “The band concert?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Because I work at her school.”

  He laughed with obvious embarrassment. “Right.”

  “What’s she play?”

  “Clarinet. And if she asks, I never said it sounded like cats being tortured.”

  “Got it.”

  “Tomorrow, though, for sure. Okay? I have to work, but I’ll be home by five.”

  “Okay,” I said, smiling to myself. “See you then.”

  I pocketed the phone and retrieved my keys from the bottom of the steps, then unlocked my door. I stepped through my front door….

  And froze in my tracks.

  The air felt wrong. The skin between my shoulder blades tingled—the strange, tight feeling I associated with being watched. Adrenaline made my hands shake. I looked slowly around the living room, trying to pinpoint what was wrong.

  Directly across from me were the french doors leading into my neglected backyard. I could have sworn the curtains had been closed when I left. Now they stood open. I thought back to the morning, trying hard to remember details. The back of the house faced west. If it hadn’t been for the incoming storm, the sunlight would have flooded the small space at this time of day. But before work, the backyard would still have been in shadow. There would have only been the soft, ambient light of morning. The question remained: had the curtains been open or closed?

  I honestly couldn’t remember.

  I stepped slowly the rest of the way inside, pushing the door shut behind me. I turned the lock on the doorknob. Threw the deadbolt. Slid the chain home, wishing there was more to be done to protect myself from whoever seemed to be out to get me. I finally turned to face the home that should have felt like a haven but now felt like a trap. Even without cold, hard evidence, I felt certain somebody had been in my house. And yet how? It simply wasn’t possible. The overly chatty locksmith from Martinez and Sons had changed my locks the day I’d moved in. I had a spare, but it took only a quick check of the junk drawer in my kitchen to verify it was still where I’d left it. The only other key to the house was the one on my ring, which I’d just let myself in with.

  Go to Dominic’s.

  But the other side of my mind countered immediately: Don’t be stupid. He has his own life to deal with. You heard him. Naomi has a band concert tonight. Besides, nobody’s been in the house.

  It was true there was no solid proof anybody had been inside. It was entirely possible it was all in my head, paranoia fueled by loneliness, the vandalizing of my car, and a few late-night prank calls. I looked around, searching for anything out of place. Had the unopened mail on the table been in such a neat little stack? Possibly. Had the kitchen towel been hanging from the handle of the oven door in exactly that way? I had no way of knowing for sure.

  I thought of Officer Richards’s card, tucked into my wallet. I could call him and report my suspicions. Somehow, I knew he’d come right over. I knew he’d take me seriously, even given the extreme lack of evidence.

  And then what?

  Would the big cop offer to spend the night? Stake out my house? Arrange for protective custody?

  I laughed to myself, hearing Officer Richards’s voice in my head: This isn’t exactly Miami Vice.

  No, I wouldn’t call Officer Richards. Not based on nothing more than frayed nerves.

  I made myself dinner and settled in with a stack of papers and a red pen, but I was jumpy. I started at every noise I heard, turning to look behind me, halfway expecting a shadow to fall over me as I sat grading book reports.

  The storm broke over Coda. The thunder was like nothing I’d ever heard, rolling back and forth across the mountains, echoing in a way it never had in Dallas. The wind buffeted branches against my house. Lightning splashed strange shadows against my walls. Thunder boomed so close and so loud, it rattled my windows in their panes. The lights flickered once and went out.

  In the pitch black, with the storm raging outside, the suspicion that somebody had been in my house became far too realistic to ignore.

  Did I know where my flashlight was? Probably still packed away in a box.

  I pulled out my phone and hit the button to light the screen. I held it out in front of me like a weapon in my shaking hand and made my way slowly through the house, checking each room and each window.

  Nothing out of place. Everything locked.

  The lights came back on as suddenly as they’d gone off.

  “To hell with this,” I mumbled.

  I drank a healthy dose of bourbon and went to bed. I slept like a log right up until 2:13 a.m., when I woke to the brazen song of my cell phone, a tinny rendition of something vaguely country. I grabbed the phone off the nightstand and checked caller ID. Unidentified number, exactly like every other time. But in that instant, my worldview shifted dramatically. My car had been vandalized, and I suspected somebody had been in my house, and now, with my phone ringing shrilly in my hand in the middle of the night, everything felt different. I knew with absolute certainty this wasn’t some middle-school student giving me a hard time.

  This was a threat.

  My phone continued ringing, and I waited, not wanting to answer. I breathed a mental sigh of relief when it went silent as my voice mail picked up. I waited, hoping it wouldn’t ring again, yet certain it would. The knowledge made the waiting worse. My heart pounded. The muscles of my neck were taut enough to make my head ache. It was the same tense anticipation I’d felt as a child, winding up the jack-in-the-box, knowing what was coming, unable to stop myself from turning the crank, yet not quite wanting to see that freaky-ass clown pop out at me. When the phone rang again, I jumped, then swore at myself for being such a wimp.

  I accepted the call and raised the phone to my ear. Swallowed hard. My mouth was dry, and I regretted the second glass of bourbon before bed. “Hello?” Such a stupid way to answer a call, even when it wasn’t some insane stalker calling. Hello? A greeting, but also a question. The single word rang in my ears, like a declaration of weakness. I swallowed again and said, louder this time, “Stop calling me.”

  There was no answer. I hadn’t expected one. But I sensed the man—or could it be a woman?—on the other end of the line. I heard the quiet sound of an exhaled breath. Somewhere in Coda, this person listened to my late-night bravado. I pictured a silhouette against a pale square of light, a faceless figure clutching the phone to their ear, hunched forward in anticipation as they waited for me to break. The empty space between us, connected by some mystery of ether and 4G networking, felt thick and heavy. Pregnant with…

  With what? What emotion drove the caller to torment me this way? Was it anger? Jealousy? Some twisted notion of love?

  “What do you want?”

  But before the words had left my mouth, the line went dead. There was no click. Just a change in the nature of the silence, a lessening of malice.

  My hand shook as I put the phone back on the bedside table. Sweat dampened my underarms,
and my heart seemed to beat both too slow and too loud, but it was over.

  For tonight, at least.

  My first instinct was to call Dominic, but a glance at the clock stilled my hand. Why wake him over something so trivial? It wasn’t as if he could do anything to help.

  What about Officer Richards? Should I call him?

  “I’ll do it in the morning,” I said to nobody at all.

  And miraculously, I went back to sleep.

  I HIT snooze one too many times on Friday and ended up rushing around like a fool to get out the door on time, but it was all for naught. I stopped dead in my tracks on the doorstep, staring at my poor Honda Civic.

  It had had been vandalized again. It wasn’t as bad as before—the windows were all intact—but all four tires had been slashed and this time, there was a message. Leave Coda! had been spray-painted across the passenger-side door.

  “Fuck,” I swore, sinking down to sit on my front steps. The concrete felt like ice through my jeans. “Why?”

  There was no answer, but the sun suddenly seemed a bit less bright. I remembered my suspicion that somebody had been in the house, followed by the prank call and my determination to call Officer Richards in the morning.

  It seemed I had no choice now.

  I called him first. Then I called Lily Wisnowski. “I’ll get a sub,” she said. “Why don’t you take the day off?”

  This time, I didn’t argue with her. And when Officer Richards arrived, I invited him inside despite the mess. It seemed ridiculous to go through it all while standing outside, even though the temperature was rising quickly.

  Officer Richards somehow seemed even bigger inside my tiny house. He listened intently while I described the phone calls I’d assumed were only kids but which now felt like a threat, and the suspicion that somebody had been inside while I’d been at work.

  “Who besides you has a key?” he asked.

  “Nobody.”

  “Your uncle? You said this was his house, right?”

  “I had the locks changed the day I moved in. Nobody has a key but me.”

  “No spare?”

  “One, but it’s still in the kitchen drawer. I checked yesterday.”