The Handyman Read online

  I wasn’t sure if that was a warning or just an acknowledgment that he knew what Frank was like, too. I nodded as though I understood, still smiling, keeping my expression neutral.

  Petey must have decided that I was all right. “It’s kind of hard to find. His place. I’ll lead you out there. Just give me a minute.”

  He walked around the side of the house to the carport, putting away his broom. I walked across the street to my car. After going into the house to get his keys (but not a shirt), he backed out in his Jeep, and I followed him through the town and down a single-lane road out into the desert.

  It was a lot farther away than I thought it would be, and I had plenty of time to go over things in my mind. Since Mike had found the Feldspar property but had not found this new location where Frank had apparently built a house and was living, I wondered if it was in his own name, if he had set up some sort of shell corporation, or if he’d simply used a new fake name that had nothing to do with “Frank.” I also regretted not asking Petey if Frank was still married. I was pretty sure Irene was dead—

  TAP TAP TAP TAP

  —but, then again…

  Even in the hot light of day, the thought of encountering a really old Irene made me shiver.

  As fifteen minutes became a half hour, and a half hour became forty-five minutes, I started glancing at my fuel gauge, thinking I should have filled up before we left Feldspar. The road wound through a series of low sandy foothills before finally straightening out and sloping into a flat barren valley containing a single two-story structure that looked like one of those green-shuttered, red-chimneyed homes featured on the cover of elementary school reading books.

  Frank’s house.

  I knew what it was immediately, and when Petey’s Jeep sped up, I followed suit. The old man turned around directly in front of the house, honked his horn, pointed at it, waved to me and sped off back the way we had come. I’d expected him to stay, maybe introduce me, at least leave me with some additional information, and the fact that he was in such a hurry to take off left me feeling a little unsettled.

  There were no fences enclosing the property, nothing blocking the house from someone on the road who wished to approach. The remoteness of the location and the isolation of the road itself was probably protection enough, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that security cameras were trained on me. Hesitating for only a second, I turned onto the short dirt driveway, pulled up directly in front of the structure and got out of the car.

  It was a Frank house all right.

  What from a distance had appeared to be a stereotypical example of a mid-twentieth century, upper middle class family home was revealed on closer inspection to be a poorly constructed hodgepodge of stucco wall and aluminum siding and wood frame, with a roof that was half shingle, one quarter shake and one quarter plain old tarpaper, all joined together in a manner that was far from seamless. The windows, I saw, were mirrored.

  I shouldn’t be here alone, I thought. I should contact the law, let the police handle this.

  I should have, but I didn’t. Ignoring my misgivings, I pressed forward, walking up the slanted porch. I looked for some sort of doorbell, saw none, and was about to raise my fist and knock, when the door suddenly swung open, revealing a man standing in the foyer before me.

  Frank.

  He looked exactly the same as he had all those years ago. He was even wearing those narrow-striped engineer’s overalls, and just seeing him sent a shiver down my spine.

  Frank hasn’t changed.

  I knew now what Petey had meant, and what had made the old man so hesitant to answer my questions. I understood, also, why he had taken off so quickly after bringing me here.

  He was afraid.

  I was afraid, too, and everything I’d planned to say upon meeting Frank once again had fled my head, leaving me tongue-tied and dumb. I could tell from the expression on his face that he knew the effect he had on me and relished it. I could tell also that he recognized me, and that was the most frightening thing. I’d been a child when he last saw me, and I was an adult now who looked nothing like that scrawny young boy, yet he instantly knew who I was. “Daniel,” he said. “Come in.” And there it was, the stare: awkward and inappropriate and held too long. I was reminded of the times he’d tried to lure me and Billy into his pickup.

  I might have been a grown man, but the dynamic between us was the same as it had always been. I felt like a kid with him, a frightened little kid. There’d always been something wrong with Frank; I’d known it even as a child, and the years of experience since had only added a depth of unwanted insight into his words and actions. I walked through the doorway, entering the house, not sure if I was doing so because I wanted to confront him or because I was submissively following his prompt. The sense of purpose that had been driving me up to this point seemed to have dissipated and faded away.

  Neither of us had spoken since I’d stepped into the foyer. I glanced around. There was an Oriental rug lying on a floor that was supposed to be hardwood but, in typical Frank style, seemed to be varnished paneling. Like its exterior, the inside of the house was as incompetently put together as everything else the man had worked on. Against the wall, impossibly, I saw our old couch, the one from Randall that we thought Frank had sold at his garage sale. My breath caught in my throat as a wave of unexpected memories washed over me: sitting on the sofa playing Monopoly with Billy during a late summer thunderstorm…unwrapping Christmas presents with my mom…watching Cheers with my dad…

  Billy, impaled on that triangular board, his open eyes staring up at me from beneath the house through the hole in the floor.

  “So how’s your brother?” Frank said. Smiling. Staring.

  My anger returned, and with it my sense of purpose. I remembered that Billy and I had never gotten into Frank’s truck back then; we’d walked away from him.

  Frank hasn’t changed.

  “How’s your wife?” I retorted, certain that she was dead and wanting to hurt him.

  “I have only the Dark Wife now.”

  What did that mean? The phrase was ominous, and the tone of voice in which Frank said it made my skin crawl.

  I needed to get out of here, I realized. I wasn’t some movie vigilante; I wasn’t going to kill Frank out of revenge or even kick his ass. Now that I knew where he was, I needed to go to the police, tell them where to find him and let them take care of it. There was no statute of limitations on murder, and even if they couldn’t pin anything else on him, they had him dead to rights on the boy walled up in his basement.

  The door had closed behind me, although whether on purpose in an effort to trap me here, or merely because Frank had not hung the door right or mounted the hinges correctly, I couldn’t say.

  I was turning to let myself out when he spoke again.

  “I hear you’ve been looking for me.”

  I swung back to face him. It was out in the open now. I wasn’t sure how he could have heard that, or who he could have heard it from, but he obviously knew that I’d been searching for him, and I didn’t bother to deny it. “The police have been looking for you, too,” I told him. “You belong in jail for what you’ve done.”

  “And what have I done?” he said innocently. “Built a few houses? Worked on some construction projects?”

  “Killed a few pets, buried a few bodies, stolen some materials…”

  Frank’s expression clouded over. “I never stole anything in my life.”

  It was interesting that that was the only charge he tried to deny. “You stole the paneling that came with our house and you used it to finish your upstairs.” I pointed to the sofa. “And you stole our couch.”

  “Your daddy gave me—”

  “My dad didn’t give you shit. He went to the cops when he found out what you’d done. And the only reason you’re not rotting in jail right now is because
they were a bunch of incompetent assholes.”

  My agitation seemed to make him calmer. “It’s been a long time. Maybe it was your mama who—”

  “She hated you.”

  He smiled. “Your mama fed me a dirty breakfast. I saw her eat a filthy sandwich.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about—it made no sense whatsoever—but the implication was definitely sexual, and when I saw the smutty leer on his face, I wanted to smack it off. “Don’t you even mention her,” I warned.

  He smiled meanly. “Your mama’s bones are in my home. I dug them up. In the dead of night. I went to that cemetery in Anaheim, across from the Pancake House, the Original Pancake House—”

  I felt sick to my stomach.

  He knew where she’d been buried.

  “—and I paid off a guy, and I dug up her coffin and opened it up and took her bones. I left your daddy there, though. Didn’t want the two of them to be together…”

  “You bastard!” I yelled, and tried to punch him, but the door opened behind me and somehow Frank was next to me, avoiding my fist and pushing me outside.

  “Thanks for stopping by,” he said. “Don’t come again.”

  The door slammed shut. I pounded on it, attempted to open it, sought to get back in, even though, only moments before, I had been desperate to leave. My anger overwhelmed my common sense, and though I knew the smartest course of action would be to notify the police, what I wanted to do was kick his ass. Not that I could. He hadn’t aged in all these decades, and I was still afraid of him.

  I stared up at the facade of the house.

  It seemed impossible, but…maybe my mom’s bones were inside, buried under a floor or interred behind a wall. The thought of it made me crazy. I felt disgusted and depressed and angry all at the same time.

  It was best to just get the police out here.

  Reaching the car, I got in and turned the key, half-expecting that, as in some bad horror movie, it wouldn’t start. It did, though, and I flipped on the satellite radio, starting when I heard a DJ talk about a Dodgers game the night before.

  That wasn’t possible. They were off last night.

  I switched the channel to CNN, where after a rundown of the hour’s top headlines, the anchor announced that it was ten o’clock, Monday, August twenty-first.

  Monday? The twenty-first?

  I’d been inside Frank’s house for six days.

  ELEVEN

  I don’t know if Teri was happier to see me or if I was happier to see her. I’d never believed the adage that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but in this case it had. She was waiting for me when I arrived back in Orange, and before I’d even gotten out of the car in front of her apartment building, she was running toward me, arms outstretched. She ran into me so hard that I would have been knocked down had she not immediately hugged me so tightly. I felt kisses on my cheeks and forehead and then on my lips, and I kissed her back gratefully, happily, passionately.

  I’d called Teri immediately after discovering how long I’d been in Frank’s house, and found that she was panicked, having left over 30 messages on my phone. She hadn’t heard from me, hadn’t been able to get ahold of me, and every scenario that ran through her head was either a disaster or a tragedy:

  —I’d fallen asleep while driving, crashed into a semi-truck, and had been burned so far beyond recognition that my body could not be identified.

  —I’d been forced off the road and over a cliff, where my car had exploded.

  —I’d slipped on a wet sidewalk and hit my head and suffered a brain aneurysm.

  —I’d choked to death in my sleep in an unknown motel.

  She’d contacted the police to report my disappearance, but since she wasn’t a relative, I was officially on leave from my job, and the only indication she had that I was missing was the fact that I wasn’t answering my phone, the cops told her there was nothing they could do. She would need more proof of my disappearance in order for them to investigate. It had made her frantic, and she’d been calling and emailing every law enforcement and government agency she could think of. While it had been a nightmare for her, I was actually glad that she hadn’t succeeded in convincing the police to undertake a big search. Now I wouldn’t have to prove that I was really me, not to mention accounting for my whereabouts every minute over the past week.

  I told her the truth about what had happened. There was no reason not to, and now I wondered why I hadn’t done so before. I left nothing out and made no effort to sugarcoat any part of it. Either I would frighten her off, or she would understand and accept, but either way, everything would be out in the open and there would be no secrets. I was done with secrets.

  I was still baffled by what had happened during my five minutes—

  six days

  —in the house, and was tempted to disbelieve it myself, even though I knew it to be true. The loss of time frightened me more than anything else ever had, more than the trip back to Randall, more than the B&B ghost in Texas. Those, at least, were expected and relatable. This was something entirely different: a complete revocation of the laws of physics.

  Even as I described it all to Teri, I was aware of how absurd it sounded, and I would not have blamed her had she gotten mad at me for lying and spinning such an outrageous story, or if she’d run away, thinking me crazy. Thankfully, she did neither. She absorbed what I said and even if she didn’t buy all of it, she apparently knew me well enough to understand that I thought it was true, and for now that was good enough for her.

  “Besides,” she teased, “I’ll be able to watch part of this on Ghost Pursuers, won’t I?”

  I hugged her tightly, nearly overcome with emotion, not realizing until that moment how important it was to have someone by my side, someone who believed in me.

  We talked for hours, going over the details of everything that had happened, examining it all with the thoroughness of grad students analyzing a Faulkner novel. She had questions, of course, but I had questions, too.

  Had he really dug up my mom’s bones?

  That was the big one. That was the question that haunted me, and the only two options, as I saw it, were to believe that Frank had been lying in order to get my goat—or to have my mom’s body exhumed to see if it was still there. The first was obviously preferable, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to live with the uncertainty. The thought of having her dug up after all this time, though, made me sick to my stomach.

  Teri put her hand on mine. “This Frank’s always been a liar, hasn’t he? Let her rest.”

  “But he knew the cemetery!”

  “Let her rest.”

  I nodded tiredly. It was good advice.

  I decided to take it.

  For now.

  Sandy Simmons had died in my absence. I learned what happened when I called to let her know that I had found Frank. I dialed her number, but the connection was automatically switched over to Brad’s phone, and when I asked to speak to her, he told me the news. She’d never awakened from her coma, and the official cause of death was organ failure.

  But I knew the real reason.

  Frank.

  I expressed my condolences to Brad but decided to leave it at that. I wasn’t going to investigate further, wasn’t going to get involved. I was done with all that. It was time to move on. I’d alerted the authorities about Frank, and whatever happened next was up to them. I would testify in court if need be, I would share whatever information I had, but I was through with any sort of solo quest. I hoped Frank would go to jail, but if not, he could rot out there in his mausoleum in the desert. My part in this was over.

  It felt good to concede that. I was starting fresh, beginning anew. I’d dumped all my baggage, and one of my first decisions as a free man involved Teri: I was going to ask her to move in with me.

  I did so over dinner in a way that I
’d seen in a movie. I made an extra key to my house, put it in a small box and wrapped it up, giving it to her in a nice restaurant right before dessert. There was a slight moment of panic when I realized that she might think this was a proposal and that the box contained a ring, but the idea didn’t appear to even cross her mind. She seemed genuinely in the dark about what the box might contain, and she was completely surprised when she saw the key and I explained that I thought we should move in together.

  It took some convincing. She’d lived in her apartment for the past ten years and was more than a little attached to it. The location was convenient for work, and she liked the neighborhood. Though she didn’t say so, I’m sure she was also afraid that if things didn’t work out between us and she gave up the apartment, she would not be able to find a place quite as nice.

  So we settled on a compromise: she would move in with me, but keep her apartment for awhile—just in case.

  “You’re not offended?” she asked.

  I laughed. “Not at all. In real estate, we advise people to do things like this all the time. Doubles up on our commissions.”

  “But you’re not selling me anything. Or renting me anything.”

  “I know. But I understand. It’s the unmarried cohabitants’ version of a pre-nup. It’s smart.”

  She kissed me. “I’m smart and you’re understanding. We make a good team.”

  “I think we do,” I said.

  My house was a three-bedroom, two-bath ranch style in a nice neighborhood on the border of Anaheim Hills. I’d been using one room just for storage, but I moved all my crap into the garage, and let Teri have the room for whatever she wanted. Her furniture was nicer than mine, or at least displayed more style, so over the next weekend, using a rented U-Haul truck and the free labor of friends, we switched out my bed for hers, swapped dressers and couches, and the end result was that her now unused apartment looked more like my house while my house—our house now—looked more like her apartment. Which was probably for the best.

  You get a lot closer to people when you live with them rather than just date, but if either of us were concerned about the implications of that, we needn’t have been. Not only were we compatible as roommates, but our relationship was deepened by the increased exposure. We were who we thought we were—only more so. I could imagine us married, in a way that I had not been able to before. I could see us spending the rest of our lives together.