The Handyman

by Bentley Little

  “And you believe that?”

  “Don’t you?”

  Teri exhaled deeply. “Yeah. I do.”

  “The question is, what’s next? Where do we go from here?”

  “Nowhere,” she said firmly. “We stay out of it.”

  “You know that old saying that the only thing evil needs to triumph is for good men to do nothing? We can’t just stay out of it and hope someone else does something. I can’t, at least. I’m involved, I’m in the middle of it all, and waiting for it to go away just isn’t going to work.”

  “Then what is going to work?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “Look, you’ve got those Ghost Hunter guys—”

  “Ghost Pursuers.”

  “Okay, Ghost Pursuer guys involved. They know this stuff. It’s their job. And you’ve told several police departments about it. What more do you think you can do? I mean, no offense, but you’re a real estate agent. This is a little out of your comfort zone.”

  What she said made sense, logical sense, but emotionally it felt wrong. I was probably just fooling myself—in the same way that I felt safer driving a car than I did flying in an airplane, even though statistics said I was much more likely to be killed in a car crash—and I honestly had no idea what to do about Frank, but I wanted to be the one to stop him, I needed to be the one to stop him.

  For Billy.

  I let the subject lie, held Teri tighter. Reaching over, she grabbed the remote from the nightstand and turned on the TV. It was later than I thought. The eleven o’clock news was already on, and a red, white and blue graphic came swooping out from the screen.

  “Breaking news in Chino Hills,” the anchor intoned. “News chopper Four is over the scene of a brutal home invasion. Chris, what do you have?”

  There was a night shot from above: an upper middle class neighborhood, police cars with flashing red and blue lights parked in the street in front of a well-kept house, officers keeping back local onlookers. Above the oscillating drone of the helicopter blades, a male voice encased in static said: “No details yet, but neighbors who called police reported hearing screams coming from the home of Van and May Tran…”

  I sat up in bed.

  “…At least one victim has been airlifted to UCI Medical Center…”

  “Oh my God,” Teri breathed.

  We watched the rest of the report in silence, though there was no additional information.

  Teri’s frightened eyes met mine. “Do you think it’s—”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You’re going to tell the police, right?”

  I was silent.

  “Oh, no,” Teri said, understanding. She shook her head. “No, you can’t.”

  “I have to,” I told her.

  “You don’t have to do anything.”

  “May? Your sister? He’s doing all this to get to me.”

  “And what do you think you can do about it?”

  “I don’t know. Yet. But—”

  “But nothing,” she said, furious. “You’re not going.”

  “My mom might be there.” It was the first time I’d said it out loud, and I realized that even though I’d seen her intact grave, I was still not sure that Frank hadn’t been telling the truth.

  Your mama’s bones are in my home. I dug them up. In the dead of night.

  The words, and the image, had been in the back of my mind all this time, and it felt strangely freeing to admit my fears aloud. I thought of what Dang Nguyen had said about wandering ghosts. Not being religious, I had never believed there were such things as spirits or souls, but that had changed, and now I couldn’t help worrying that my mom was not at rest, that Frank had interfered with what was supposed to have happened to her and that she was lost somewhere.

  I looked into Teri’s face. “I have to go there.”

  “You’re not going alone,” she warned me.

  “You’re not coming.”

  “Dumbledore’s Army.”

  I frowned, confused. “What are you talking about?”

  “In the movie Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix?”

  “Never saw it,” I admitted.

  “It’s on every other week.”

  I shrugged. “Never saw it.”

  “Okay, well, in the movie, Harry spends half the school year training students to fight Voldemort and forming Dumbledore’s Army. But when it comes time to confront Voldemort, Harry wants to just take off by himself. Hermione convinces him to take a couple of his friends along with him. They hold off the Death Eaters, but people still die. If he’d brought the entire army, all the kids he’d trained, as originally planned, they might have been able to save everyone.”

  “I get it. There’s safety in numbers.”

  “Yes. Which is why I’m coming with you. And you should try to bring your ghost hunters. Ghost pursuers. And maybe your friend Mark or some of Frank’s other victims who have a score to settle. But not my sister,” she added quickly.

  “Which is the same reason I don’t want you—”

  “I’m coming,” she said simply.

  We were at a stalemate.

  “Call the police,” Teri suggested gently.

  “They’ve done such a great job so far.”

  “What can you do, though? You still haven’t answered me that.”

  “Something,” I said, and though I didn’t know what that might be, I believed it. “Something.”

  TWO

  Teri and I were eating breakfast in the kitchen, searching the internet through our respective phones, looking for news about May and Van, when we were interrupted by a knock at the front door. I went out to see who it was.

  Mark Goodwin.

  I was stunned to see him. I’d been planning to call Mark this morning and let him know that Teri and I were going out to Frank’s house, certain that he’d want to come along. But I didn’t understand why he was here now.

  “Mark,” I said, surprised.

  He grinned. “Long time no see.”

  “Come in, come in.” I reached out to shake his hand at the same time he tried to hug me, and we ended up in an awkward shoulder-patting half-embrace.

  “It’s been awhile,” he said, smiling, and for a brief second, underneath the years, I saw the old Mark. I suddenly remembered a time when I’d been staying overnight at his house and we snuck downstairs to watch Saturday Night Live. It was something his parents had expressly forbidden—their family had a strict no-television-after-ten o’clock rule—but we made it into the living room without anyone hearing us, and we turned on the TV, keeping the volume so low that we had to almost press our faces against the screen. Mark had had that same smile on his face back then.

  I still would not have recognized him had I met him on the street, but, happily, he looked better than he did in his Facebook photo. He definitely seemed older than me, but his eyes were not as haunted as they were in the picture, maybe because he no longer had to carry his burden alone but had me to share it with.

  “I found that satellite photo of Frank’s place, just like you said. Then I got your email about the Vietnam stuff. I figured you were getting ready to go over there, and I wanted to be in on it. So I drove all night and…here I am.”

  He’d known what I was planning to do before I did.

  Teri emerged from the kitchen. “Teri,” I said, “this is Mark Goodwin.”

  She smiled. “Nice to meet you. Daniel’s told me so much about you.”

  “And your house,” I added.

  “You are going to see Frank, aren’t you?” Mark asked.

  Teri and I both nodded.

  “Good,” he said. “Good.”

  We’d been eating cereal, but when Teri asked Mark if he’d eaten anything this morning, and he admitted that he
hadn’t had anything except coffee, she offered to make him an omelet, and he gratefully accepted. “You want one, too?” she asked me.

  “Sure,” I told her.

  “Three omelets, coming up.”

  I realized how lucky I was to have her. We’d shared the cooking duties when we’d first moved in together, but once it became obvious that her culinary skills far surpassed my own, she pretty much took over those responsibilities, while other aspects of household maintenance became my job. We were settling in, smoothing off rough edges until we fit together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, and while it just so happened that our abilities tended to fall along traditional gender lines, neither of us felt put upon or in any way constrained by our roles.

  Maybe Teri was right, I thought. Maybe I should just be happy with what I had and let someone else deal with Frank.

  But he was taunting me.

  And I couldn’t live with myself if someone else’s life was ruined due to my inaction.

  Could I live with myself if something happened to Teri?

  I pushed that thought aside.

  We talked as we ate breakfast, Mark filling Teri in on more details of his family’s house in Randall and the repercussions of their time living there. It was a depressing story, and she gave my thigh a reassuring squeeze under the table as Mark described how his dad had died in a freak accident, slipping on a spot of oil at a gas station, falling and cracking his head open on the concrete next to his car. His mother had committed suicide less than a year later, swallowing oven cleaner, and Mark had been the one to discover her bloody lifeless body on the floor of her kitchen.

  “Oh my God,” I said.

  He had gone through the same sort of mental anguish that I had after the death of my parents, coming to the conclusion that if they had not moved into Frank’s house, circumstances would not have led to his father being at that gas station on that day. He would not have slipped and fallen and died, and his mother would not have committed suicide. Of course, there were a million other variables that could have also changed the outcome, but Frank was the only one that mattered to Mark. Or to me.

  Because it was intentional.

  I filled in more detail for Mark about what we’d learned regarding Frank.

  “So what’s the plan?” he asked. “We go out there and burn the place down?”

  Arson? It was illegal, and it hadn’t occurred to me, but it was the first course of action that anyone had come up with. I glanced over at Teri, who shook her head, frowning.

  “It’s an option,” I said. “Definitely not our first choice, but maybe it’s an idea we should keep on the back burner.”

  Mark smiled. “So to speak.”

  “No,” Teri said firmly.

  “So what then?” Mark asked.

  “I don’t know exactly. But Teri’s right,” I told him. “We need to go out there in force, with as many people as we can. I’m going to ask Evan and Owen, the two writers and researchers from Ghost Pursuers, and see if they can bring along the psychic they work with and anyone else they know who might be interested.”

  I’d thought about what Teri had said regarding inviting some of Frank’s other victims. I’d even considered calling Brad Simmons, who’d started all this back in Big Bear, but, safety in numbers notwithstanding, I could not justify bringing in anyone else when there was a strong likelihood that this might prove dangerous. Or deadly.

  “I don’t know how long it might take to get everyone together,” I told Mark, “but it could be a few days. Maybe you should go back home and back to work and let me call you.”

  He shook his head. “I have vacation time saved up, and this is it. When you’re ready, I’m ready.”

  “Where are you staying?” Teri asked politely.

  “Here,” I answered for him. “No reason to waste money on a motel. We have room.”

  “No,” he said. “I’ll find someplace nearby.”

  “But—”

  “I have night terrors. Not all the time, but it does happen. I don’t want to be waking you guys up with my screams. Besides, I feel more comfortable on my own, not sharing space.”

  Mark had an adult’s voice now, but the cadences and rhythms were the same as they had been when he was a kid, and, just like back then, I could tell when he was being honest.

  He was being honest now.

  I didn’t try to argue him out of it. “If you’ve been driving all night, you should probably get some sleep. There’s a decent motel about a mile away. Cheap, fairly clean. I can show you where.”

  “I am tired,” he admitted.

  Mark drove a Kia, and he led me out to where he’d parked on the street, opening his trunk. “I brought baseball bats for both of us,” he said, showing me. “Just in case.”

  “Holy shit!” I picked up a red aluminum one. “Is this Mr. Sluggo?”

  “The one and only.”

  Mr. Sluggo had been Mark’s bat when he was a kid. Neither of us had been particularly athletic, and though Mark’s dad had bought the bat so that Mark could practice hitting balls, Mr. Sluggo was actually used by us to ward off his brother Dean and to practice for imaginary run-ins with local redneck teenagers.

  Mark picked up the other bat, hefted it. “And if I see Frank…” He left the thought unfinished.

  I drove to the motel in my van, Mark following in his Kia. After checking in, we went up to his room. I told him to get some sleep and call me when he awoke. “I’ll try to get things going,” I said. “Hopefully, there’ll be plans in place the next time we talk.”

  “We’re really going to see Frank again.” There was a combined sense of dread and wonder in his voice, as though for the first time the idea was actually sinking in.

  “We really are,” I told him.

  Back home, I called Evan.

  “Dude,” he said. “I was just about to call you.”

  My heart started racing. “Why? Did you find out something else?”

  “Not really, no. Well, sort of. But that’s not the reason I was going to call. We did look up information about those wandering ghosts, and apparently it is a thing. I mean, it’s not totally unknown in Vietnam; it’s kind of an accepted belief. I’ll email you what we found. But the reason I was going to call is because I think we should head out to Frank’s place.” He paused dramatically. “We have a development deal.”

  “You have a…development deal?”

  “Damn right. We sold our concept. Told you it was a winner. We didn’t want to jinx it, so we kept quiet, but after our little excursion yesterday, Owen and I had a meeting scheduled with the head of programming for the network and a bunch of big honchos. We laid out the Frank story, explained a couple of ways it could go, and they bit. Best part of all? Owen and I are the show runners. Scott’s not even involved—it’s all us! Hey, you want to be a creative consultant? Executive creative consultant? After all, you’re the one who started this ball rolling.”

  “I just want to find Frank.”

  “Well, we can do that. We can definitely do that. We have a budget. We can fly to Texas. Hell, there’s no reason we can’t shoot the season backwards. Start off with the big Frank confrontation, then fill in the backstory later. They’re giving us time to shoot the entire series—thirteen episodes—before the first show even airs. That’s a luxury we’ve never had with Ghost Pursuers.”

  I was starting to get excited, but not for the same reasons Evan was. I didn’t give a damn about a TV show. But with money and people behind us, it seemed to me that we had a legitimate shot at bringing Frank’s misdeeds to light and maybe getting some semblance of justice.

  “I want to bring a couple of people along,” I said.

  “The more the merrier.”

  “My girlfriend’s one.”

  “Cool.”

  “The other is a guy who used to live in
that house in Randall—”

  “Kick ass!” Evan said excitedly. “Do you think he’d be willing to talk? Think we can get him on camera?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “You’d have to ask him.”

  “Excellent, dude, excellent. Of course he’s invited.”

  “Do you think you could ask that psychic—”

  Evan laughed. “Already done. She’s part of the package. She’ll be in every episode.” He started talking about his vision for the show, how the fact that it was not an episodic supernatural reality show but had a continuous through-line was going to give it more weight than something like Ghost Pursuers, and I listened politely, but for me this was merely a means to an end. For him, it was the end. We were almost exact opposites of each other, Evan and I, but it was a complementary relationship, and we were both getting what we needed. Before I hung up, I reminded him of how scary Frank’s house in Randall had been, and warned him that this trip was going to be dangerous.

  “Excellent!” he said. “Excellent!”

  I was pretty sure he’d missed my point.

  Later, he called back to let me know that a plane had been booked for the next day. “Time flies when you have money at your disposal,” he said. “Be there or be square.”

  Both Teri and I had a hard time sleeping that night. I was more angry than scared, but she was more scared than angry, and she tried to talk me out of going. It was something I needed to do, I told her. I let her know that she didn’t have to come along, that I would prefer it if she stayed, but she adamantly insisted that wherever I was going, she was going—although she would prefer it if we both stayed home.

  The next day, Mark met us at the house for an early breakfast, and the three of us drove in Mark’s car to the Burbank airport, where Evan, Owen and their team had arranged for a flight to San Antonio. They had arrived first, and we were filmed walking into the airport.

  “Cut!” Evan said as we approached. He walked up, grinning, slapping his arm on the back of the ponytailed cameraman. “Here’s our shooter. You remember Twigs? From Ghost Pursuers?”

  Twigs nodded disinterestedly at me. “Hey.”

  “The same deal applies,” I told Evan and Owen. “I don’t want to be on camera.”