by B. E. Scully
Rachel closed Cal’s browser history and quickly signed into their bank account. They had two checking accounts, one in each of their names, and two joint savings accounts, one for short-term goals and one for long-term savings. After settling the loan for the house and making some of the initial improvements like new carpets and electrical wiring, the long-term savings account had an almost ten-thousand dollar balance left. Or at least, it used to have an almost ten-thousand dollar balance left—even though her brain could barely process what her eyes knew they were seeing, the new balance in the account was less than four-thousand dollars. Rachel skimmed through the withdrawals and there they were—three-hundred dollars at the hardware store on September 18th, then another hundred at the greenhouse a week later. A five-hundred dollar check to “Ray’s Removal Service,” a two-hundred dollar cash withdrawal—a steady trickle until six-thousand dollars had vanished into thin air.
Just like Jackson.
Just like their savings.
Just like everything.
Rachel opened up the checking account under her name. There was her first paycheck from her new job, and there were the withdrawals for the usual monthly bills—nothing out of order. Next she opened the account under Cal’s name, and wasn’t surprised to find that the account hadn’t registered any activity for over thirty days. Cal hadn’t been paying the renovation expenses out of money from his freelance work, like they’d agreed. He’d been paying it out of their savings account.
Rachel closed the laptop and stared blankly, blindly out the window.
Forget about the kids we’re supposed to start having in a few years—never be able to afford that now.
Better also hope the car holds out for at least the next decade. After all, we still haven’t even gotten all of the toilets working yet.
Better start taking on extra hours at work as soon as possible if you want to take a vacation before you’re ninety.
Without even realizing it, Rachel was opening and closing her fists as the blind white rage ran its course.
This is it, Rachel thought, steeling herself to go downstairs and finally have the by-now long overdue blow-out. This is absolutely, positively the LAST STRAW. This is war.
But something beneath the apple tree caught her eye and made her forget even the last straw. Because it wasn’t actually something beneath the apple tree—it was someone. In an instant of recognition, Rachel realized it wasn’t just any old someone—she knew that stooped, broken posture, bent over in perverse imitation of the apple tree; that floppy-brimmed hat pulled low over the forehead, almost to the eyes; that big round head cocked slightly to one side in arrogant certainty of himself—somehow, for some horrible reason, Roy Crampton had come onto their property and was standing beneath the apple tree, staring at his own house!
Rachel drew back from the window with a gasp. Had he seen her up here? And what was he doing out there in the yard anyway, on their property?
She edged closer to the window, taking one tiny step at a time until Roy Crampton and the apple tree came back into view. He was still gazing hypnotically at his own property. Every now and then he would glance down at something he was twisting and turning in his hands, but it was getting too dark for Rachel to see clearly. As she watched, Crampton suddenly swung around and looked straight up at where she was standing at the window. She started to duck back, and then froze with a second, even more terrifying realization.
The man standing beneath the apple tree was not Roy Crampton. Even though it was impossible for Rachel to believe she’d mistaken him for their elderly neighbor, the man standing beneath the apple tree—the man staring up at her staring down at him—was none other than Cal Goodman, her own husband.
3
The laptop was plugged in just like before. Even though she’d already dusted the table twice, Rachel ran the cleaning rag over it one more time, just in case. Ten minutes ago, she’d been chomping at the bit to confront Cal with evidence of his crimes, but that already seemed like a trivial detail from some other lifetime. In this lifetime—the one where her husband skulked around the yard like a creep spying on the creep who spied on them—the only thing that mattered was eradicating the evidence of her crime.
She moved the laptop a half-inch to the right and stood back to examine it. Too straight, she decided, and bumped the corner—careless disarray definitely suited Cal’s style more than her own color-coded sock drawer standards.
Finally satisfied with the effect, Rachel sat down in the living room to try and think. She was aware that she was acting stiff and unnatural just when she needed to give the appearance that everything was fine, but she couldn’t help it. Nothing had changed between ten minutes ago and now, and yet seeing Cal beneath that apple tree had changed things. She couldn’t have explained why, but the last thing in the world she wanted right now was for Cal to know that she’d been snooping on his laptop. She couldn’t just let the missing money go, of course—add it to the long list of overdue conversation topics. And yet right about now, Rachel would have gladly jumped into the canal rather than attempt to address even one of them.
Maybe there was some kind of mistake or misunderstanding. Maybe Cal would clear the whole thing up with some perfectly obvious explanation. Maybe years from now they’d laugh about the whole thing—Hey, remember that time you sneaked onto my laptop and thought I’d wiped out the savings account without telling you? Yeah, what a laugh riot that was!
And yet Rachel continued to sit on the living room couch, stiff with a dread as tangible and horrid as the stained and peeling Amityville wallpaper.
It wasn’t as if she was afraid of Cal. It was more like waking up one day after four years of marriage to find herself living with a stranger—a stranger who walked, talked, and sometimes still acted like her husband, but wasn’t.
Or was he? Maybe he’d actually been a stranger all along, right from the very beginning.
Get yourself together, Rachel, she told herself. Her mind then automatically supplied the rest of the wake-up call—because you’re soon going to need it.
Out of long habit, Rachel reached over for the warm velvet fur behind Jackson’s ears before remembering that Jackson was gone. The timed electric candles on the front windowsill flickered to life, and Rachel watched their reflection in the television screen and waited for her husband to come home.
* * *
So his wife had a secret spying place, too.
Cal Goodman stood beneath the gnarled old apple tree, waiting. A strong easterly wind was blowing leaves off the trees, and they pin-wheeled past Cal’s shoulders before coming to rest at his feet.
Like ash, Cal thought.
The nights were now cool enough for cardigan sweaters. Soon the notorious Pacific Northwest rains would arrive and stay put until next summer.
But not yet, Cal reassured himself. Not quite yet.
He turned away from the window where his wife had been spying on him and returned his attention to his neighbor’s house. He watched the thin line of smoke curling from the chimney before it was taken away by the wind. Cal had been waiting to see that smoke ever since Jackson ran away. Maybe he’d been waiting for it ever since that very first day, when Roy Crampton had confronted them over his barbed wire fence and made that rude gesture at Rachel. Hell, maybe he’d been waiting even longer than that—maybe his whole life.
The night Jackson ran away, Cal had tried to get him back. Rachel could accuse him of “not doing a goddamn thing” all she wanted. She hadn’t been the one standing in Roy Crampton’s driveway for half-an-hour pounding on the steel gate. She hadn’t been the one behind his house shouting himself hoarse for Crampton to come out. She wasn’t the one who had gone back to the steel gate and the fence every single hour of every single day ever since Jackson disappeared. As a matter of fact, she wasn’t the one to do anything around the house—she just drove away to her neat little job every morning and drove home at night, thinking the house and the yard cleaned and repaired and reno
vated themselves all by themselves while she was gone. Come to think of it, Rachel didn’t do much of anything anywhere, ever—Cal was always the one who had to handle everything, to make sure everything was right and everything would be just fine, honey, just fine indeed, because your warrior-man alpha-male is out front to take all of the slings and arrows while you sit up in your fucking chair rocking away and crying whenever something doesn’t turn out perfect.
It could get to a man after a while, that sort of thing.
After the night Jackson disappeared, Roy Crampton hadn’t shown up beneath the apple tree at the usual time. In fact, he hadn’t shown up anywhere, at any time. But Cal was going to get that dog back one way or another. He didn’t know if it would make any difference between him and Rachel—hell, he didn’t know if anything could do that at this point, and he also didn’t know if he even cared anymore. But he was going to get that dog back, and if Roy Crampton refused to make a move first, then Cal was going to make it for him.
“You move your king two squares toward a rook on your opponent’s first rank, then move the rook to the square over which the king crossed,” Cal whispered as the wind caught his words and took them away with Roy Crampton’s smoke. “It’s the only move in chess where a player can move two pieces in the same turn. But castling can only be done if the king has never moved and the rook has never moved. And the king can’t be in check or end up in check. Of course.”
If someone had come along the pathway and told Cal he’d just spoken out loud, he would have been surprised to hear it.
He closed his eyes and breathed in the sharp, acrid smoke. The darkness was creeping in earlier and earlier as autumn nudged summer out of the way for another year. Even though it wasn’t even eight o’clock yet, the sky was already turning squid-ink black. The wind was still gusting through the trees, but in a few more hours it would calm down and go to sleep for the night. At least, Cal hoped it would.
He opened his eyes and looked up at the twisted, gnarled branches of the apple tree silhouetted against the last of the sky’s light.
It was time.
* * *
The smell of smoke was getting stronger. At first, Rachel ignored it, figuring the Crampus had his furnace blasting away like always, oblivious to the weather. But the smell kept getting stronger—too strong to be just a wood stove. She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting in the living room, but it was now pitch-black outside and Cal still hadn’t come in.
And yet Rachel couldn’t seem to bring herself to get up off the couch. She didn’t know why, but the lead-heavy dread that had sunk to the bottom of her stomach the moment she’d seen Cal beneath that stupid tree seemed to be anchoring her in place. Her legs felt as stiff and unwieldy as two sign posts, as if getting up and walking to the front door was as fantastic an idea as expecting the Empire State Building to start strolling across Manhattan.
Or maybe her legs were just more honest than her brain—maybe they were making the decision to stay inside for her. And yet sooner or later, whatever was outside would eventually make its way in.
She put one lead foot in front of the other until she was out the front door and moving toward the apple tree, going as slowly as possible to delay her destination.
But the dread caught up with her before she even arrived.
Even halfway across the yard Rachel could see that the night sky above Roy Crampton’s property was lit with a flickering orange glow. The air was so thick and bitter with ash and smoke that Rachel had to cover her mouth with the sleeve of her shirt.
“Cal? Cal, where are you?”
She ran toward the apple tree and then stopped.
The ancient tree was engulfed in flames. It looked like an enormous creature twisting and turning in a futile battle against its even more ancient enemy. As Rachel stood there fixated on the terrible, tormented tree, she heard the wood groaning in agonized protest against its fate.
And there, standing close enough to the fire to risk going up in flames himself, was Cal.
He was gazing at Roy Crampton’s house with the same rapt attention Rachel had seen earlier when she’d spied him from the window—with one major difference. Rachel couldn’t remember seeing Cal smile even once since Jackson disappeared, but now his face was split by a smile so wide and pure it was almost radiant—almost, if not for the sinister little uptick betraying one corner into a sneer.
“Cal!” Rachel yelled across the groan of the tree and the crackle of the flames, but he didn’t seem to hear her. She cursed herself for leaving her phone in the house, and was about to turn back to call 9-11 when she heard the wail of approaching sirens.
“Hurry up, hurry up!” she urged, but it was already too late for the bone-gray house. As Rachel watched in fascinated horror, a hungry tongue of flame licked out across one of the tree’s branches and then, still not satisfied, enlisted the help of the wind to jump the short distance to Roy Crampton’s roof.
At first, nothing happened. Rachel thought the fire might burn itself out before it did any serious damage, but then a gust of wind fanned the flames into full blazing life. Within minutes, the rooftop vanished beneath waves of black, acrid smoke.
Cal was still standing near the apple tree, still dangerously close to the growing flames. Not bothering to call out to him a second time, Rachel pressed the bottom hem of her shirt against her mouth and ran toward her husband. If he resisted, she didn’t have the strength to overpower him. They might both burn to death right there under the apple tree.
But when Rachel grabbed hold of the back of Cal’s shirt and dragged him away from the flames, he made no attempt to stop her. In fact, he was behaving as if he was in some kind of a trance, like a sleepwalker.
The fire trucks were at the end of Crampton’s drive now, transforming the property into an ear-splitting, eye-blinding spectacle of lights and sirens. But for some reason, the trucks stayed parked at the end of the driveway while the flames raced across Roy Crampton’s roof.
“Oh my god, the gate!” Rachel said, more to herself than to Cal.
But the sirens seemed to have woken Cal up.
“They’ll cut the lock,” he said. “Or even cut through the gate if they have to. They have equipment for things like that.” He spoke slowly, looking around as if not quite sure where he was or how he’d ended up there.
The sound of resisting metal soon took up where the sirens left off, and within minutes the firemen had their powerful hoses trained on the roof. But the delay had been a critical one. The flames were almost double the size of the house now, dancing and leaping like wild animals set free from a cage. And they weren’t about to go back in just yet.
Rachel caught sight of Cal headed toward the canal path in the direction of Crampton’s house. “Cal, where are you going?”
“To get a better view.”
“Cal, come back to the house—please!”
When he kept right on walking, Rachel ran to catch up. If Cal was going to be crass enough to stand there and watch their neighbor’s house burn down, she might as well go ahead and join him.
It took over two hours to put the fire out and almost two more for the crew to search through the smoking, crumpled remains. So far, no one had turned up a trace of Roy Crampton anywhere on the property.
By the time the last fire truck and the stand-by ambulance pulled away, it was well past midnight. Some of the crew came over and inspected Cal and Rachel’s property to make sure the flames hadn’t spread.
“It’s lucky the wind died down when it did,” one of the firemen said. “Even though it wasn’t blowing in your direction, one stray spark could have lit your place up just the same. Especially with that old roof of yours. Probably a good idea to replace that in the next few years.”
“Yes, it’s…it’s on the list,” Rachel stammered.
“Any idea where the owner’s at?”
She was standing on the front porch, wishing Cal were there to answer their questions. But try as she might, she
couldn’t get him to budge from behind Crampton’s house. She’d left him standing there almost two hours ago, and as far as she knew, he was still back there.
“He’s almost always home, so…he didn’t—I mean, he’s all right, isn’t he?”
“Seems as if nobody was home. Tomorrow a team will come out to comb through the place more thoroughly, but rest assured, right now there’s nobody in there.”
“What about the dogs?”
“The dogs?”
“He has dogs,” Rachel said. “In the sheds. The row of sheds along the far side of the house. Did the fire get them, too?”
“Oh, yeah, they actually took it worse than the house. Conditions are so dry right now, any purely wooden structure is going to go up like a book of matches. You folks ought to be more careful about fire hazards, especially way out here. House could burn to the ground by the time we get here, especially when you put locked metal gates across the drive.”
“What about the dogs?”
“We didn’t find any dogs in there. Might have died in the fire, but we didn’t find any remains. Owner probably took them with him.”
“But…” Rachel didn’t get any further than that. Because really, what could she say?
The ground tilted beneath her feet and the sky made an alarming full circle rotation around her head. She leaned against the porch railing to keep from going down.
“Ma’am, are you okay?”
“Yes, I’m…I’ll be okay.”
“Listen, we really need to get in touch with the property owner. Do you have a phone number or some other address or contact information where we could reach him?”
“No, I’m sorry, but…he’s known as a kind of a recluse around here. No one knows how to reach him.”
“Okay, any place you know he might be staying? Relatives or anything like that?”
“No, I’m sorry, but I don’t really know much of anything about him at all.”