The Handyman Read online

  I almost added, “I love you,” but didn’t. That was the distance talking, and the last thing I wanted to do when I returned was walk back some embarrassing statement I’d made out of loneliness. Although, staring now at the black screen of my silent phone, I thought it might actually be true. Maybe I did love her. And if she’d made a special effort to drive by my office when she knew I wasn’t there, just because of its connection to me, maybe she felt the same.

  That probably should have made me feel better, but it made me feel worse, and I ended up turning on the television for company. I sat through two commercials, one for medicine that apparently helped old men get erections while they were folding laundry with their younger wives, and one where an elderly actor tried to convince people to gut their children’s inheritance by signing up for a reverse mortgage. I felt weighed down by everything. When the nightly news came on, even though the top story was about a school shooting, I felt strangely comforted because at least the anchor and the set and the reporter were familiar.

  The news ended and an entertainment program came on. Feeling braver and more settled, I pulled open the drape. Outside, the sideways smile of a new moon hung low in the sky. I could hear crickets and cicadas, but the only sound of human habitation in this land was the far off noise of a pickup’s engine. Looking in vain for any sign of the naked child, I saw only clumps of grasses and brush that in the darkness resembled Horta-like monsters encroaching on the bed-and-breakfast.

  Had I seen what I thought I’d seen or had I imagined it? And, if I had, was it connected to the Frank house?

  It almost had to be.

  With nothing to do, I ate my dinner of Pringles and Coke while watching a drug smuggling documentary on CNN. I tried to check my emails, but something was making my phone slow, so I sat on the bed, channel surfing. The first Men in Black was on TNT—wasn’t it always?—and though I’d seen it a hundred times, I stopped flipping to watch it. I’d had a long day, and before the first commercial, I was starting to doze. Feeling sleepy, I took off my clothes, turned off the TV and crawled under the covers.

  I was awakened much later by a banging sound. Sitting up groggily, I wasn’t sure for a moment where I was and thought the noise might be someone knocking on the front door of my house in California. Then I recognized the room, realized where I was, and thought maybe the old woman was trying to wake me up for some reason.

  A burglar? A fire?

  No. The noise wasn’t coming from the door, I quickly discerned, but from somewhere on the floor above. It was a steady beating, the sound coming every few seconds in regular intervals. I closed my eyes, lay back down and waited for it to go away, but it didn’t. The banging continued, got louder if anything, and finally, I swung out of bed, slipped on my pants and padded over to the door, opening it.

  In the hallway, the noise was even louder, as though someone upstairs was hitting a baseball bat against a wall. I’d come out because the noise was annoying, had awakened me, and I wanted it to stop. But it was too loud, too insistent, and the whole situation seemed more than a little threatening. The fact that there was no sign of the old woman was unsettling, too. Looking toward the stairs, I tried to tell myself it was water in the pipes or a heavy wind outside that was making a branch hit the roof, but I couldn’t make myself believe it because I knew it wasn’t true.

  Someone was upstairs.

  Hitting something.

  The banging continued.

  I walked slowly up the steps to the floor above, thinking how like the stairway in our A-frame this was and wondering if Frank had based these stairs on those in our vacation house, stealing the design just as he had stolen so many other things.

  No, he couldn’t have. He’d built this way before he’d moved to Randall.

  The banging grew louder.

  At the top, a weak yellow light illuminated a small landing. I stepped onto the floor, seeing two doors in front of me. One open. One closed.

  The open doorway revealed a room that was pitch black.

  That was where the pounding came from.

  I wanted to run back downstairs, run outside, get in my rental car and never come back. But I remained rooted in place.

  The noise suddenly stopped.

  “Hello?” I said tentatively.

  From within the lightless room came a soft glow, a glow brightening slowly to reveal that its source was an old lamp atop a narrow end table. The room was illuminated now, but not well, and gathering my courage, I stepped over the threshold. I saw a low couch, an old-fashioned high-backed chair, a chest of drawers, a bed. There was a window off to the right, but it was covered by closed brown curtains so thick that they let in no moonlight. My nose was assaulted with a sickly scent of decay that made me think instantly of the dogs underneath our vacation home.

  A low tapping started up, its origin a closed closet at the far end of the room. The sound was quiet at first, barely perceptible, but it slowly began to increase in volume, and I knew that it would eventually turn into the pounding again.

  I wanted to get out of here before that happened—

  tap tap

  —but I needed to know what was in the closet.

  Tap Tap Tap

  I moved forward slowly, afraid that any sudden movement would awaken whatever else was in the room. Glancing at the bed to the left of me, I saw that the covers were turned down as though someone had been sleeping there.

  TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP

  The tapping was louder, not pounding yet but well on its way.

  I recognized the closet door in front of me, and it took a moment to place where I’d seen it before, though I should have known it instantly.

  Sandy Simmons’ house.

  It looked like the door to the closet in her “workspace,” the one where I’d heard—

  Irene’s fingernails

  —tapping but had been too afraid to investigate.

  I was forcing myself to be brave, though I had actually never been so frightened. I stepped closer. In the second before I reached the door, I glanced to the right, where an ornately framed mirror was mounted on the wall. I met the eyes of the figure in the mirror—

  But that figure wasn’t me.

  Instead, looking out from the glass, her face impossibly old and horribly wrinkled, was Irene. She smiled as she saw that I recognized her, and her teeth were so white that they glowed.

  I cried out.

  I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t scream like a little girl—it was a fairly manly sound, if I do say so myself—but I cried out nevertheless, and, after stumbling backward, I got myself turned around and sped down the stairs to the first floor.

  Where the old lady who ran the B&B was waiting for me, frowning. “What were you doing up there?” she demanded.

  I blinked dumbly, my heart still pounding from my upstairs encounter. “Irene...She was…”

  “Get out,” the old woman said disgustedly, looking at my shirtless chest.

  Rationality began to return. “What?”

  “We don’t want your kind here.”

  I looked at her, my breathing on its way back to normal. “My kind, huh? And exactly what kind is that?”

  She met my gaze with a hard level stare. “Get out.”

  “I understand now why you’re so busy here,” I told her. “It’s that friendly, welcoming attitude.”

  “Am I going to have to get my gun?”

  “Am I going to have to call the law? I paid for a full night.”

  She hesitated, and I could see her weighing the options in her mind: getting rid of me and losing out on a hundred dollars versus letting me stay and keeping my money. Greed won out. “I want you gone by morning.” She turned, and I watched her walk away, heard her stomp down the stairs to her quarters in the basement.

  My kind?

  What the hell did that
mean?

  I didn’t know and didn’t care. Returning to my room, I locked the door behind me. I actually did want to leave. The thought of spending another second here terrified me, but if that old bat could survive here, so could I.

  Frank house.

  That was the source of everything, the reason behind all of it: the naked kid, the creepy house, the ghostly noises, Irene.

  Irene.

  I had no explanation for that, and I wanted to believe it was my imagination, but I didn’t think it was, and for the first time since I was a child, I pulled the covers over my head for protection and waited for sleep to come.

  In the morning, either before the old bitch had awakened or before she’d come up from her basement, I packed up my stuff, left the key on the desk in the living room, and took off.

  I drove out of Biscuitville the way I’d come. Past the unbuilt house and the fallen barn, past the drab café and the dusty main street.

  Maybe, I thought, Frank’s influence had affected the whole town.

  The idea gave me no comfort, and I gratefully put Biscuitville in my rearview mirror as I headed west toward New Mexico.

  TEN

  I sat at the Denny’s in Tucumcari, staring out the window.

  What had I been thinking?

  I’d taken an unspecified leave of absence from my job, and a mere three days later I was already set to pack it in and head home. Las Vegas had been a waste of time, I hadn’t learned anything new in Bernalillo, and despite my nightmare experience in Biscuitville, I hadn’t gotten any information out of that witch at the B&B. I wanted justice, I wanted closure, but was I going to get it by doing this? Driving pointlessly across the country from house to house? I figured I should just give it up now before throwing away even more time and money.

  It was Mike Rivera who set me on the right path. He called me at that moment, as I was drinking coffee and watching a semi pass by on Interstate 40. Mike was not only showing two of the homes I had listed, but he’d spent half of yesterday going through my computer looking for unfinished business. Somehow, I’d forgotten to delete a portion of my recent research, and he had looked up and found a current address for Frank Watkins.

  The name he’d used in Randall.

  His real name?

  I couldn’t believe it.

  “Yeah, it looked like you were searching for this guy who’d been using a bunch of aliases and had something to do with that Big Bear sale. I figured I could help. He’s pretty low-tech, but you can’t stay off the grid if you’re selling houses and paying utilities. He actually wasn’t that hard to track.” Mike had a facility with computers that went far beyond mine. At one time, he’d been a low level programmer at a failed start-up, but he’d found he could equal his tech income with real estate, a job it turned out he enjoyed much, much more. I probably should have enlisted his help earlier, but I’d been wary of involving anyone else.

  Although, if it had been so easy to find Frank, I wondered why law enforcement hadn’t been able to do it.

  According to Mike, Frank was back in Nevada. A nowhere town called Feldspar. It was somewhere in the empty center of the state, and I had Mike email me the information so I could access it on my phone.

  “I assume this means you’ll be back soon,” he said.

  “Probably,” I admitted. “It was stupid for me to take a ‘leave.’ I should’ve just banked a few extra vacation days. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “That’s cool,” Mike told me.

  I heard the disappointment in his voice and smiled. “You and May can keep those listings I gave you. A promise is a promise. Besides, I owe you for this info.”

  “Glad you’re coming back,” he said heartily, and this time he meant it. He lowered his voice. “With only May and Jim here, the atmosphere’s a little—”

  “Serious?”

  “Sterile, I was going to say. I need you around to help loosen the corsets.”

  We talked a few moments longer. He had questions about one of my listings in Tustin that he was going to be showing later today—the real reason he’d called—and I told him everything I knew. I was anxious to get him off the phone and start off for Nevada, and the second he hung up, I downed the rest of my coffee and called for my check.

  My GPS was working again, but the shortest route to Feldspar was through some of the most godforsaken country known to man. Thank goodness for satellite radio, which allowed me to listen to music while travelling through desert where no regular radio stations could reach.

  I spent that night at a real motel, a Holiday Inn Express, and I’d never in my life been so grateful for the bland anonymity of corporate America. After that hellish B&B, the antiseptic atmosphere of a generic Holiday Inn was the most welcome end of the day I could imagine. I ate a dinner of grilled chicken with wild rice pilaf in the adjacent restaurant, took my first shower in two days, and fell asleep in air-conditioned comfort to the sounds of The Tonight Show. In the morning, I had a “continental breakfast” that was closer to a real breakfast than anything I’d had since leaving home.

  Refreshed, reinvigorated and ready, I set off for Feldspar.

  It was mid-morning when I reached the town. Feldspar was only slightly larger than Biscuitville, and I decided then and there that when this was all over, I was going to spend the rest of my life safely within the confines of the endless metropolis that was Southern California.

  My GPS was still working, and it directed me to a residential street off the short main drag.

  To an empty lot.

  I stopped the car.

  Not again.

  I was filled with a deep sense of disappointment. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected to find—Frank holed up alone in a rundown shack or living in a perfectly maintained tract home?—but I honestly thought that I’d see him. I’d even gone over different scenarios in my head, planning out possible conversations and numerous opening lines as I’d driven through the empty arid land. Now, once again, it was all for naught.

  Parking in front of the empty lot, I got out to look around. Amidst the dried weeds, empty beer cans, broken glass and windblown detritus, the ground was rough. There were post-sized holes and lengthy trenches that appeared to have been dug for pipes. It was as though the house that had once been here had been ripped up and pulled into the sky, foundation, plumbing and all.

  I had a bad feeling about this. On the off chance that one of the neighbors might know what had happened, I walked across the street to where a skinny old man in a dirty tank top was sweeping his porch—a futile exercise in this environment. “Excuse me!” I said.

  He looked up, squinting against the sun. “Yeah?”

  “Do you know anything about that lot across the street? I’m looking for a man named Frank—”

  “Frank?” he said. “Yeah, I know Frank. He used to have a house there.”

  I could feel my pulse accelerating. “You wouldn’t happen to know where he is now, would you?”

  “At his new house, I assume.”

  “New house?”

  “Yeah. Built it himself. Been buildin’ it for a long time, in fact. I remember when he first started. Took me out to see it once. Back then, it was just one room, hardly bigger’n a storage shed. But he just kept addin’ on and addin’ on, keepin’ nails and pipes and scraps of lumber from other jobs he did and usin’ them for to put up his own place. Kind of like that Johnny Cash song about the car. You know, where he steals a little bit at a time from the assembly line and builds himself a one-of-a-kind automobile?”

  I didn’t know the song, but that didn’t matter. I knew Frank’s pattern. A thought occurred to me. “Did Frank steal from you?”

  The old man laughed raspily. “Hell yeah! Had him put in a new faucet? He bought extra parts, charged them to me and kept the rest. Built a deck for me in the back? Overbought lumber a
nd kept the extra boards. Oh, it was harmless, but he couldn’t help himself. That’s just who he was. Like this uncle I had. Used to kype somethin’ every time he came over: ashtray, lighter, apple, penny, whatever. Nicest guy in the world, give you the shirt off his back, but he just had to take stuff when he stopped by…”

  “And Frank was like that?” I prodded. “Stole things?”

  “Oh yeah. Stole from himself, even. Or recycled, I guess. That’s why there ain’t no house there no more.” He pointed his broom toward the lot. “Once he moved out for good, he started tearin’ the place apart, takin’ wood and siding and plumbing, piece by piece, until there was nothin’ left.”

  “Do you still see Frank?” I asked.

  The old man hesitated for a little too long. “Frank don’t get out much anymore. I think he mostly just stays inside his house.”

  “Yeah, he must be pretty old,” I reasoned.

  There was another weird pause. “I guess so.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know where this house is, would you?”

  “Sure. I even drive by there sometimes, just to see how things’re comin’ along. I don’t stop—Frank likes his privacy—but I do check the place out, and it’s…impressive.”

  “How do I get there?” I asked him.

  Another hesitation. “I’m not sure…”

  “I need to see him.”

  The old man looked me over, appraising me. He seemed to like Frank and perhaps thought he was acting as a gatekeeper, so I didn’t want to let him know how I really felt. I tried to keep my expression neutral. “Frank knew my family back in Randall, Arizona. I haven’t seen him for a long time.” I put on my best professional smile, extended my hand. “My name’s Daniel. Daniel Martin. I’m in real estate now.”

  He shook my hand noncommittally. “Petey Bodean.” He thought for a moment. “I don’t think Frank’s interested in selling.”

  “That’s not why I want to see him.”

  He gave me that appraising look again. “When was it you knew Frank?”

  “Mid-eighties,” I said.

  “Well…Frank hasn’t changed. Frank’s still Frank.”