A man stepped outside the restaurant. “What the hell happened?”
A faint police siren grew closer, and I looked for the officer we had been talking to a few minutes earlier. I found him moving his way to Bobby.
Jordan appeared at my side, Nathan pushed his way through the crowd before the cop.
“Is Bobby okay?” I asked.
Jordan didn’t answer. I moved further from the crowd and closer to the door. The marque blinked IZZ above my head with an electric hum.
A man directed the crowd. “Back up! Back up!”
I climbed on a decorative boulder, gaining at least two feet to look over the crowd. Bobby struggled to stand, the police officer and bystanders urged him to stay on the ground.
“That bitch,” Bobby yelled. The gossiping gawkers quieted, almost to a silence.
“Sir.” I recognized Ken’s voice over the low murmur. “You shouldn’t move until the ambulance gets here. You don’t know if—”
“That-bitch-pushed-me.” Bobby’s words came out choppy, like the string holding his sentence together had been sliced to bits.
Jordan looked up at me. “Who pushed him? I want to give her a medal.”
Nathan shook his head, approaching us. “He fell.”
The police officers quickly set up a roadblock as the ambulance arrived. The EMTs checked Bobby over, then led him into the back of the ambulance.
Time moved slowly by while I recounted the accident in my head. I gripped my stomach as nausea crept over me. Nathan hadn’t seen what I had seen. Bobby didn’t fall.
Cecelia grabbed my elbow, and I touched the wall to steady myself on the rock. “What happened?”
Tristan and Gary stood beside Cecelia. For as big as Gary was, he didn’t seem to hold his liquor well. He swayed back and forth for a moment before leaning against the building.
Ken walked up, his eyes shifting hesitantly around at each of us. “Meg, can I talk to you for a second?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
“It was just Nate out here with you, right? When Bobby...tripped?”
“Me, Meg and Bobby’s friends,” Nathan said.
“C’mon.” We followed him to the cruiser where a black officer with a pencil thin mustache waited, his arms crossed, looking at me with squished eyebrows. “This is Officer Hayes. Meg was—”
“Mrs. Zebraginger.” Officer Hayes cut him off.
“Zebenfaiger. And it’s Miss,” I said.
“Sure, Miss Zebrafinger... Mr. Benson says you pushed him into the road.”
“What?” I said it loud enough for Bobby to hear me. In fact, the whole damn street probably heard me.
“We were by the door when he fell into the street,” Nathan argued.
“They’ve got a camera trained at the door, one at the street.” Hayes pointed in a few places, and I looked for cameras. Instead I only saw tiny blinking red lights. “Amazing how many cameras these security systems set up now. You can pull up footage immediately, digitally.”
“Are you trying to get him to sell a security system now, too?” Nathan asked, looking at Ken.
Hayes continued. “The owner is pulling the footage, but if it doesn’t show—”
“It’ll show,” I said. “It’ll show me and Nate standing right there — with another officer by the way—”
“He says you weren’t there,” Ken interrupted.
“What?”
Hayes said, “One way or the other, he said there wasn’t a blonde out here. Just Mr. Dieter.”
“She was right next to me,” Nathan said. “Barnes had to have seen her. He was talking to me.”
Hayes shook his head. “He only noticed you, getting ready to follow Bobby and start something.”
Nathan scoffed. “I wasn’t starting anything. Bobby—”
I squeezed Nathan’s arm. “Whatever. The tape, it’ll show Bobby hopping around like an idiot, grabbing his crotch. You know I wouldn’t do that, Ken.”
Ken looked away and muttered something to Hayes. It occurred to me, Ken didn’t know any more about me than what he’s heard from Jordan. Most of those stories would have been narrated by a bitter ex-best friend. Meg was not to be trusted. To confirm my thought, Ken said, “We’ll have the tape in a minute.”
“She was with me, Ken,” Nathan said, his voice firm. “I wouldn’t lie.”
“I know you and Jordan have had your, uh, history with Bobby,” Ken said, looking uncomfortable.
“Fuck you, Ken,” Nathan said, taking a step towards Ken. “History. That’s bullshit, and you know it. You’d think you’d put this together quicker; after the problems you had in Cave Junction—”
“All right,” Hayes said and looked at me. “Just go home, after we look at the tape—”
“We saw it,” another officer said, approaching us and shaking his head. “We couldn’t get a good look at the street, but it shows these two at the door. They weren’t anywhere near him.”
Ken nodded. “Meg, I’ll get Jordan to take you home.”
“What?” Sarcasm spewed from my mouth. “No ‘I’m sorry, I accused you of shoving a man into traffic?’”
“Come on.” Nathan put his hand on the middle of my back and steered me to where our group waited for us. Sans Ken.
Even though we left a wide space between us and the open ambulance, Bobby spotted us anyway. He yelled, “Bitch!” one more time for good measure.
Though, who could blame him? I hadn’t pushed him, hadn’t been anywhere near him, and now there was footage to prove my innocence. But Bobby and I had seen the same thing, a thin woman with blond hair, there one second and gone the next. In the moment she had been there, she definitely pushed him into oncoming traffic.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Like actors in a play filling the lead roles of my siblings, Cecelia, Jordan, Nathan and even Gary fed me directions I needed to follow that evening. Cecelia fell into the primary decision maker role, and I might as well have called her Angela from that point out. Jordan, Nathan and Gary had no opinions of their own, but agreed Cecelia knew best. Cecelia decided it was time for me to go home and get my mind off the evening.
“Tristan, take Meg home,” she commanded and he seemed to appear out of thin air, ready to fulfill her wishes.
“Cecelia,” I leaned over and whispered close to her ear. “What if I didn’t want to go home with him?”
She lowered her chin and looked over to Tristan then back. “Really?”
Tristan smiled with a look that I’m sure guaranteed most girls would follow him anywhere. Not a single physical protest lurked in my body, but I fought a tingling of refusal because of Nathan. But, why? He was busy telling Jordan about his argument with Ken, and he’d barely given me a glance since we’d left the officers.
Anything I’d imagined I’d felt with Nathan I realized, had only been imagined. This fact solidified when he curtly nodded goodnight, as I walked away with Tristan. I forced myself to rationalize. I was only in town a week or two more, tops. Keep the fantasy, rather than make a fool of myself and destroy the fantasy.
I followed Tristan back to his truck, glad my buzz was gone. I watched his feet to make sure he wasn’t stumbling. The last thing I needed was for the police to pull us over as soon as we pulled out of the parking lot. Someone must have given that man a pot of coffee, because he was more sober than he had been an hour ago.
The ride home was silent, except for me mumbling a direction every once in a while, and him beginning stilted conversations. Why did he even try? He had to be aware that this was a sure thing. People always wanted to fill the long drive out to Dad’s with conversation, instead of soaking in the silence or the next song on the radio. Speaking of which, he hadn’t even turned the radio on. I reached for the knob, just as he stomped on the brakes.
I pressed my hands against the dash to keep from hitting my head. “What the hell, dude?”
I followed his gaze out the front window. Three deer stood a few feet from the truck, staring at
us, like we were party crashers.
“Holy shit, I almost didn’t see them.” The trees and clouds ate any starlight that may have been out that night. “It would have been a mess to hit all of them.”
We sat in quiet, the music forgotten. He pressed his horn twice. My shoulders relaxed as the animals shot across the road and into the trees.
He looked at me, and we both laughed. The awkwardness that had filled the truck since we climbed in dissipated, and I no longer let his attempts at conversation go unanswered. I interjected here and there as he complained about work, and prompted him to keep talking until we pulled in the driveway — no matter how much I couldn’t stand his voice.
“Do you want something to drink?” I asked. He didn’t answer, but instead turned off the truck and followed me up the steps. By the time I opened the front door, his mouth was on my neck, his hands around my waist.
Without the bedframe, the mattress had shifted crocked under the window. We laid on the mattress, naked and warm under the sheets. We heard when the wind and rain picked up through the cracked window. Lightning had lit up the night while we moved earlier, showing me the parts of him I wanted to see. Hopefully shading the parts of me I wanted to keep private.
The storm washed the night clean. He hadn’t spoken in a few minutes, and I was sure from his still body, he planned to stay the night. Morning nookie sounded nice, but I would not be falling asleep soon. My mind raced with the events of the evening.
“Tristan,” I whispered. “Can I use your phone?”
“Where’s yours?” he muttered, revealing his near surrender to sleep.
“I don’t have one. Please? I haven’t been online in forever.” Tracy was usually fine with me using her phone in small chunks of time, and on days the air conditioning went out in her building, I would walk to the library and kill time on Facebook.
Without looking at me, he reached into his pile of clothes, grabbed his phone and dropped it over his shoulder. “Password is 1234.”
“Original,” I joked, but he didn’t respond. I opened the browser and logged into Facebook. My wall was full of political opinions and declarations; most of my friends stood as political activists according to their Facebook accounts. But they were mostly fast food eating, discount mart shopping, water wasting Americans. Just like me.
Random bits of news slid by my eyes. A friend, well, a Facebook friend I knew from Happy Taco, was pregnant. Another friend announced an engagement. We’d lost rock star to suicide. A Hollywood couple, destined to last until the end of time, called it quits after drug abuse. Oh, and an affair on a so-called secluded beach.
“Turn off the light,” Tristan moaned. I stood up and tugged on the chain down, switching the lamp off. He muttered thanks, and his breathing returned to heavy.
I typed in my email address and password, not expecting anything good. I deleted a few overdue bill notices. Two emails looked promising; one from Tracy and one from Angela. Tracy’s subject line read “how are you?” It ended up being a bill for two grand she felt like I owed her for staying at her place and eating her food. And now that I’m selling the property can I please forward her cash? She used the same email address for her online banking, and that would be fine.
Delete.
The email from Angela ended up being a list of relatives to contact while I was in town. Some of them might be interested in buying the property, cutting out the middle man. Also, she still had a close relationship with Aunt Minnie and Aunt Lydia, she’s sure they would help me out if I needed anything. Something fluttered against my arm and I shivered. A moth must have gotten in through the screen. I swatted at it. That’s what I got for leaving the window open, but the breeze had felt good on our bodies earlier.
What if it was another mole? Nope, I needed to chill out. Moles didn’t flutter.
I read through the list of Angela’s suggestions, growing more annoyed at the name and description of each relative. Many did not even sound familiar, Angela was always better at staying on top of the extended relatives than I was.
The bug landed on my arm and I flicked at it. The flutter came again, and when I turned the phone around to light up the spot, the air was empty. I deleted the email, and the bug grazed down my skin again.
Two choices my lazy body did not want to contend with: get up and kill it, or spend the entire night letting it crawl on me. I reached for the lamp, sure Tristan had submitted to sleep, but stopped just short of the switch. It could be dangerous waking a strange guy up in the middle of the night. I’d been there before, and ended up with a drunk man swinging punches in the air.
Instead, I laid his phone down and hoped my eyes would adjust to the dark so I could smash the damn bug. The wind blew our way, and the curtains flew up and into the room. Just enough light entered to catch the glint in Wolfy’s eyes. I hadn’t noticed him back in the room earlier when we first got home. Was he awake and moving around the room?
The curtains fell again and were sucked out the rip in the screen as the wind changed direction. Tristan stirred, and I thought about Tracy’s cousin. We had spent a weekend together a few months ago, and one night he got up and made a sandwich in his sleep. He had also stolen a twenty-dollar bill I had in my purse. In his sleep. Ha.
I picked Tristan’s phone back up and logged out of my email. A strong smell floated in with wind’s change of direction, and I was surprised I hadn’t smelled it earlier — rotting grass left in a lawnmower over the winter.
Another brush against my arm startled me. I dropped the phone and reached for the moth.
Instead of a bug, I found a thin and cold finger laying on my bare forearm. I traced the finger to a hand that lead away from the bed. The curtains flipped open, slapping a rod of dim light back in. A face, wretched and leaking, sat inches from my own.
Everyone gets those dreams where they’re running from something. You open your mouth to scream, but no sound comes out. When my mouth opened that night, I was sure not only would no sound come out, but that my fast beating heart might actually shoot out of my throat, making me all the more vulnerable to the thing kneeling by my mattress.
The wind changed direction again, sucking the curtains back through the window screen, sinking us into darkness. The scream I feared wouldn’t come, flooded the room.
Tristan shot up. So much for not waking a strange man in the middle of the night. I felt him throwing the covers around, looking for me. “Meg? What’s wrong? What’s going on?”
I forced my voice out, in a normal tone. “Someone’s in here.”
“That loser from the bar?” he asked. “Man, I’ll kill you.”
What I wanted to tell him it was the woman from the tree, but he wouldn’t believe me. Or, if he did, he wouldn’t understand the implications of her. The others had seen her, I know they had. He rolled off the mattress and fumbled in the dark. I grabbed for the lamp and turned it on, scared at what we’d see.
It was just Wolfy, me and Tristan. I looked over at him, expecting to see him throwing his clothes on and running away from this crazy woman he just had fucked. But he stood naked, with a gun in his hand, pointed at the half-open closet.
“Where did you get a gun?”
“Is there someone here?” he asked, eying the sliding closet door as though something might burst out.
“I-I don’t know.” I looked at Wolfy. He would have seen. The gun in Tristan’s hand made a clicking noise. “Where did you get a gun from?”
“My glovebox.”
“Why is it in my house?”
He breathed heavy, looking at the ajar door, but lowered the gun to his side. “Cecelia said...about the nightmares. You might have one. I guess I forgot.” He looked at me. “No one’s here? It’s just...a dream. Right?”
I sighed. How did Cecelia know about the nightmares? Had Jordan told her yet another thing about me I didn’t give him permission to? “The gun?”
“I thought it might be a good idea after your ex-boyfriend tonight.”
A crash came from the living room and Tristan adjusted something on the gun. He motioned for me to close the window and stay in the room.
It was like being in an action movie with his deep voice and gun in hand sidestepping into the hallway — albeit a B movie. Maybe one of those homemade YouTube ones. I closed the window and waited, vulnerable in the bright bedroom. I was a target, but unwilling to turn the light off and tempt the woman to come back. I found my t-shirt in the mess on the floor and pulled it over my head, self-conscious.
“Holy shit!” Tristan yelled, and I ran to open the door. The gun went off.
It was deafening in the old house, and I expected the walls to crumble down around me. I fell to Wolfy’s side, wrapping my arms around his neck.
“Tristan?” I whispered, and it came out in jagged tears. I cleared my throat and spoke again. “Trist—”
“Meg, come out here!” he shouted. He didn’t sound scared, like I would have expected from someone who’d just shot a gun off in a dark house.
Somehow, I made it out to the living room, as much as I would rather have crawled into the bed and closed my eyes. Tristan stood over a small lump on the floor. Another mole. But not just any mole. It was the peg-legged mole.
“I swear to God; my eyes were fucking with me. I thought it jumped at me.” He laughed. I wanted to tell him that it did jump at him; the trees gave it life. He wouldn’t understand. Even though he saw it with his own two eyes, he wouldn’t believe himself. “You know, it seemed bigger at first. But it’s stuffed and small. And it has a stick for a leg.”
“A peg leg.”
“Whatever.”
“It jumped at you.”
“No, it fell.” His voice grated on me, my IQ dropping the longer I talked to him.
“Then what was that sound? Before you came out here, the thump?”
He pointed at the living room window. It was one of those old ones that opened by swinging them into the room. It used to blow open when I was little, I remember, during the larger than life storms. The ones that would knock power out for days. The last time I remember it opening wasn’t from a storm though, but a deer. The doe’s head pushed the window open and then started munching on a tray of apple cores Aunt Dee set out, drying over the woodstove.
Going Home (Cedar Valley Hauntings Book 1) Page 17