The Handyman

by Bentley Little

  Why had I tracked down Frank anyway?

  Billy.

  Billy.

  I took a deep breath. I wasn’t just a part of this—I was right in the center of it.

  I went to bed early that night, tired, stressed and longing for rest. Teri stayed up watching some cooking show, but when I awoke shortly after midnight, she was fast asleep next to me. Why had I awakened, I wondered? I usually slept through to dawn, especially when I was tired. Something must have—

  There was a tap on the window.

  Tap

  Beneath the blanket, chills ran over the surface of my body. Teri was still sound asleep, an unmoving lump next to me. I wanted to wake her up but knew I shouldn’t, so I just lay there for a moment, hoping I hadn’t heard what I thought I heard.

  Tap Tap Tap

  Far more frightened than I wanted to be, I carefully pushed off the covers, slid out of bed and walked across the darkened room to the window. Peeking through a space in the partially parted curtains, I saw a shriveled hand in the night outside, a wizened finger with a long black nail softly rapping against the glass. Behind the ancient hand…

  Irene.

  She looked just as I’d feared.

  Thin white hair blew gently about her wrinkled emaciated face, while somewhere in her sunken sockets were the remnants of eyes, dry darkened orbs too small to fill the empty black space surrounding them. Her mouth could do nothing but grin: the deflated lips were pulled back so far that they were unable to close, and the gums beneath had receded so far that the exposed teeth were huge.

  I almost cried out—it was my first involuntary reaction—but recognition that it would wake up Teri caused my conscious mind to override that impulse and kept my cry of terror down. Still, I closed my eyes and, like a child, covered my ears.

  Had Frank sent her after me? Or had she followed me of her own accord?

  Was she the one making noises like a crying baby?

  The very idea intensified my fright. I imagined that shriveled skeletal hag hiding somewhere just out of sight in Teri’s parents’ house or my office, her wreck of a mouth opening and closing to emit the sounds of a distressed infant.

  Opening my eyes, I expected her to be gone, but she was still on the other side of the glass, grinning horribly at me, that terrible crooked finger with its sharp blackened nail no longer tapping on the window but beckoning me outside. I took the fingers from my ears, heard nothing.

  “What are you looking at?”

  I saw Teri’s reflection in the exposed section of window at the same time she touched my shoulder, and I jumped, startled.

  I exhaled, aware that I’d been holding my breath. “Nothing,” I said.

  “Don’t give me that.” She leaned close to the crack in the curtains, squinting at the glass, and it was clear she saw nothing, though Irene’s emaciated face was grinning in at her.

  How was that possible? And why was it happening? I still didn’t know, but it didn’t really matter because Teri was here and she believed me, and I reached out and pulled the two halves of the curtain shut so I couldn’t see out.

  I looked into her eyes. “I love you,” I told her.

  This was the right time.

  She smiled back at me, kissed the tip of my nose. “I love you, too.”

  But she frowned in the split-second that she glanced at the closed curtain before we both went back to bed.

  TWELVE

  Despite my fears, despite my worries, I did not see Irene again. And though periodically I still heard the sound of a baby crying, it was always in the daytime and always far off, and I was almost certain that the wailing infants were real children.

  Scott Spencer emailed a response to me several days later, informing me that the Ghost Pursuers team was on hiatus. They were finished shooting for the season and wouldn’t need to start working on any new episodes for another six months (if the show was renewed, he said, which at this point was by no means guaranteed). Hoping to take advantage of what had seemed to me to be a mutual respect, I emailed him back immediately and laid all my cards on the table, letting him know that this was personal, and suggesting that if Ghost Pursuers did have another season, I’d be providing his team with an episode that would tie into their two “Most Haunted Town in America” shows and could serve as an easily promotable season opener.

  Spencer still wasn’t buying what I was selling, even after I went into more detail about the Frank connection. But he was nice enough to provide me with email addresses for Evan and Owen, the show’s writers. They were more than happy to discuss ideas with me. Between seasons, they were officially unemployed, and though they were each working on spec scripts of their own, the experience in Randall had made them true believers and put stars in their eyes. They were both open to collaborating with me on either a Ghost Pursuers episode or something totally unconnected to the program. We set up a time and place to meet: next Wednesday for lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Whittier, halfway between their home base in Los Angeles and my Orange County office.

  I’d been meaning to look up the whereabouts of Mark Goodwin since my trip to Randall, but events had conspired to put that off. Now, however, I made the effort and, to my surprise, found him easily on Facebook. He was a physical therapist, and he lived now in Tucson. In the displayed photo, he looked older than I expected, older than me, though we were the same age. I searched that lined face in vain for some resemblance to the young boy I knew in Randall. It was the eyes that usually remained the same, despite changes to the flesh surrounding them, but Mark’s eyes looked haunted, and I knew that he’d had a hard life since I’d last seen him.

  I started off slowly, with a friend request. He responded almost before I was through typing, as though he’d been waiting for this moment. I knew it was a coincidence—he just happened to be online at the same time I made my request—but it seemed like fate, and we IM’d back and forth, quickly catching up on each others’ histories. Mark, it turned out, was divorced, with no children (“Thankfully,” he wrote). His ex-wife was in jail, doing ten years for drug trafficking. His parents were both dead, though he did not tell me how they’d died, and I did not ask. He had no contact with either his brother or his sister: the last he’d heard, Dean was somewhere in the northwest, doing manual labor; he had no idea where Janine was.

  There was nothing self-pitying about his matter-of-fact descriptions, but he seemed to have had a sad life, and I wondered how much of that could be attributed to Frank.

  I didn’t want to jump right in with that, so I approached the subject obliquely, over a period of days, pretending as though Frank was just one of many childhood remembrances that were returning to me since Mark and I had reconnected.

  By now, we were talking to each other over the phone, and to my surprise, he admitted flat out that Frank had ruined his life. “It was that house,” he said. “Everything started to go wrong when we moved into that house. I told you it was haunted, right?”

  “I saw it for myself,” I told him. I thought about mentioning Ghost Pursuers, but I wanted to hear what he had to say. I could go into all that later.

  “Well, it…affected us. Dean and I both got into drugs, and I’m sure part of it was finding that dead kid in the basement, but that wasn’t all of it. Janine turned into a complete slut, started fucking every guy she saw. My parents…” He sighed. “We never really talked in that family, but from what I gathered, what I could piece together from the arguments I heard through the walls and the bits of conversation I happened on, my dad was supposed to have had his tubes tied, but my mom was pregnant again. She swore that it was his, but he never believed it.

  “Not that it mattered. She had a miscarriage.”

  I remembered suddenly that Mark had had a baby sister, though I couldn’t remember her name. “What about your little sister?” I asked. “The baby? What happened to her?”
<
br />   Mark was silent for a moment. “She fell out a window. An upstairs window. Landed on a rock, cracked her head open and died.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “That window…” Mark spoke slowly. “Frank made it too low. Kate was only one and barely able to walk, but it was just the right height for her to put her hands on the sill, lean over and fall out. You know Frank had no screens. And the window was open because it was hot and we’d opened it to let the air in. I’m not sure how Kate got upstairs. She was supposed to be in my parents’ room in her crib, taking a nap.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told him. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “Even after we sold that house and moved…it seemed like it stayed with us. The Frank Effect, I called it. Bad luck just seemed to follow us everywhere we went. Did I tell you how my parents died?”

  My mouth felt dry. “No.”

  “It was in the mid-nineties. I was in Phoenix, working, going part time to a JC, and they were living up in Montana, where my dad had gotten a job with some copper mining company. One night, middle of the night, I get this call. It’s from the Missoula police department. My parents were in a single-vehicle crash. They smashed into a tree and were both killed on impact.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Thing is, they weren’t drinking, there wasn’t any… No one could find a reason for the accident. But on their answering machine, though, was a call. From Frank.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah. I don’t know how he got their number or where he was calling from or even if it was the first time he’d called. But I recognized his voice immediately, even though I hadn’t heard it since he sold us the house when I was, what, twelve? He was telling them to drive to Helena and meet him. Didn’t explain why or anything. At least not on the message.

  “And on the way there is where they were killed.”

  It was past time for me to come clean, and I told Mark about the disintegration of my own family, and about my recent re-acquaintance with Frank’s world, from Brad and his mom all the way up to my trip to Frank’s house. I left out nothing, and was glad I didn’t.

  Because he, too, had seen Irene.

  Like me, Mark thought he’d been the only one creeped out by Frank’s wife. Frank’s negative qualities were so aggressively upfront, and his wife so cowed and submissive, that it seemed wrong to feel anything but pity for her. But though he’d seen her only briefly, Mark had had the same reaction to Irene as me, and he, too, had had recurring nightmares about her as a child.

  He’d also seen her recently.

  It had been decades since Mark had even thought about Irene, but several weeks ago he’d gone before dawn to the physical therapy center to accommodate a client who’d requested a session before work, and he’d seen an old lady standing beneath a palo verde tree at the edge of the empty parking lot, partially lit by a nearby street lamp. Irene Watkins was the name that came immediately to mind, although he had no idea why. Not only had he not seen her in decades, but he could not even remember what she looked like. Still, something in the woman’s stance or body type seemed familiar, and the connection his brain made was to Irene.

  He did remember the nightmares he’d had as a kid, and as a slight warm breeze fluttered the dress she was wearing, Mark hurried inside the building. He might be an adult now, but the thought of Irene still creeped him out, and even if the woman in the parking lot was just some anonymous homeless person, there was something eerie about the way she stood there all alone in the near-darkness, unmoving, her billowy dress flapping gently around her.

  Mark made sure to lock the door behind him before walking down the corridor to the exercise room. He turned the lights on as he stepped inside.

  Irene was standing outside the floor-to-ceiling window, pressing her face against the glass and grinning in at him.

  There was no doubt this time that it was her. He recognized that wrinkled visage, remembered it clearly from childhood, and though he was a grown man now, he was filled with fear. He was glad that he’d made sure to lock the door, and even more glad that he was inside the building while she was outside. Acting far braver than he felt, Mark strode over to the window and rapped on it, his fist directly in front of her face. “You’re trespassing!” he yelled, though he was not sure she could hear him through the thick glass. “Get out of here, or I’m calling the police!”

  Still grinning, she moved away from the window, backing up without looking until her pale face and fluttering clothes faded into the pre-dawn darkness. There was a blurry smudge on the glass where her face had pressed against it, and Mark stared at the spot, feeling suddenly cold. He had seen similarly blurred imprints on windows at his apartment and on his car over the years, not giving them much thought, assuming they were caused by dew or dust or heat or atmospheric conditions. Unable to take his eyes off the spot, he knew now that they’d been imprinted on the glass by Irene’s face.

  “She was real, tangible, but I had the same impression you did,” Mark said. “That she was dead.”

  I have only the Dark Wife now.

  “I’m pretty sure she is,” I told him. “Did you try to go after her or anything?”

  “Hell, no! I stayed inside. In fact, I went around checking doors and making sure they were locked just in case she came back. I didn’t relax until my client showed up.”

  “Any signs of her since?”

  “No.” He was quiet for a very long moment. “So what do we do now? What happens next?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  We left it there, but it made me feel uneasy that he, too, had seen Irene. I didn’t know what it meant, but I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all.

  For the next week, everything seemed a little bit…off. There was nothing I could point to specifically, nothing I could really put my finger on, but the clothes I chose each morning turned out to be either too warm or too cool for the weather, none of the listings I showed impressed any of my prospective clients, Teri and I weren’t in sync sexually, I was twice given the wrong take-out order for lunch, and the Lincoln seemed to be even more sluggish and unreliable than usual. I was grateful for the weekend, and I used my Saturday to rewrite some poorly conceived property descriptions that I’d put on our website a few days earlier. When the phone rang, I let Teri pick it up in the kitchen. A moment later, she walked into my office with a bemused expression, holding the phone in her hand. “For you,” she said.

  “Who is it?”

  “Julie,” she said. “My sister.”

  “She wants to talk to me?”

  “Apparently so.” Teri sounded as surprised as I felt. She handed me the phone.

  This was weird. I hadn’t spoken to Julie since the trip to Ramona and, truth be told, not much even then. I barely knew the woman. “Hello?” I said.

  “Daniel? Hi. Do you have a minute? I have a few questions I thought you might be able to help me with.”

  “Sure,” I said. “What do you need?”

  “You’re in real estate, right? So you probably know something about home improvement-related issues? I was wondering if you could give me some advice. See, we hired this guy to put in a new toilet. For the past month or so, it would keep running after you flushed it, and you had to jiggle the handle to get it to stop. That’s okay, we could live with that. But a few nights ago, the tank started leaking. We found out about it in the morning when we woke up and the whole bathroom was flooded. I mopped it all up, Ron shut off the valve or water pipe or whatever, and we decided to just replace the whole thing. We had this handyman do it, a jack-of-all-trades kind of guy. He charged about half of what the cheapest plumber would’ve cost us, but he ended up doing a really crummy job. A day later, we had to start jiggling the new handle to get it to stop running. Now the guy says he won’t come back and fix it unless we pay him again, even though, we think, after one day,
there should be some sort of warranty. I thought you might know something about what to do, whether we have any rights here, whether we should file a suit in small claims court or what.”

  “Is there a way to get in touch with this guy?”

  “We have his phone number. He was recommended to us by some friends, who had him work on a deck in their backyard. I guess they had no problems. His name’s Frank Wharton...”

  Frank Wharton.

  I didn’t hear anything else.

  Frank?

  It couldn’t be.

  But it had to be.

  I was holding the phone so tightly that my fingers hurt. While it was just barely possible that this was all a coincidence, it was not the least bit probable. This whole thing was way too close to home, and my mind was spinning as I traced the connections. Despite what Julie might think, she and her husband had not hired some random handyman. Frank had clearly set his sights on working for Julie—because she was Teri’s sister. Hell, he might have even found some way to break that toilet himself just to get the ball rolling. Why? Because he was stalking me, playing with me, going after people in my life, trying to keep me involved after I’d sworn to stay out of all this.

  But I couldn’t get past the logistics. I’d left Frank in his house in the middle of Nowhere, Nevada, less than two months ago. In that time, he’d not only tracked me down but found out that I was dating Teri, hunted down Teri’s sister Julie, then wormed his way into the life of Julie’s friends, doing a good enough job building their deck that they had recommended him to her? How was that possible?