The Handyman Read online

  But then…Frank was weird.

  We were lying in our beds in the loft that night, each of us staring up at the slanted ceiling. My parents had invited Frank and his wife over for dinner, and they’d stayed so long that Billy and I had had to go to bed before they left. Downstairs, we could hear Frank telling my parents in detail how the town council had asked him to help design and build an addition to the town hall. Eventually, goodbyes were said, the front door opened, and there were footsteps and voices on the wooden deck as my parents walked outside with Frank and his wife.

  “Finally, he’s gone,” Billy whispered. I hadn’t been completely sure until then that he was still awake.

  “Frank?” I whispered back.

  “Yeah.”

  We were silent for a moment.

  “I don’t like him,” Billy said. “He stares.”

  I knew exactly what he meant, but I was a little surprised that my brother had picked up on that. The truth was that Frank had an unnerving tendency to look at you for too long both before and after he answered a question you’d asked him. It was a disturbing habit, and for some reason, it made me think of an alien trying to be human. There seemed to be an incomprehension in that gaze, a sense that he was attempting to access information that would indicate the proper way to behave, as though he didn’t know how to respond in a human manner. It was a ridiculous idea that I knew made no sense, but the feeling was there, and the thought occurred to me that since he obviously wasn’t an alien, maybe he was crazy.

  The idea scared me, because I honestly believed it could be true.

  As strange as Frank was, however, it was actually his wife Irene who haunted my nightmares.

  I wasn’t sure why. She was a nice woman. Around adults, she seemed to round off Frank’s rough edges, and with kids she had kind of a grandmotherly air. In my dreams, though, Irene Watkins was just…creepy. In real life, she was thin and old and wrinkled, but all of those features were exaggerated by my imagination, and in my nightmares she was a hideous crone whose decrepit visage chilled my spine.

  In one dream, I had awakened in the middle of the night and Billy was gone. My parents weren’t in the house, so Billy was my responsibility, and I ran down from the loft and through the small house searching for him. He was nowhere to be found, but I heard a noise outside, and when I pulled aside the curtains and looked through the window, I saw him running across the street to Frank’s. The house was dark, but I could sort of see it in the moonlight, and the front door was wide open. Billy ran inside, and in that instant the two upstairs windows lit up, the front of the house turning into a cubist version of Irene’s face. The light in the right window flicked on and off like a winking eye, and the dark doorway widened and grew until it had turned into her toothless mouth smiling malevolently at me. From somewhere inside, I heard my brother screaming in terror.

  Then I woke up.

  Another time, I was dreaming but I thought I was awake, and I looked at the window between my bed and Billy’s and saw Irene’s wrinkled face floating in the air outside, staring in at me.

  By the light of day, however, Irene was as nice as could be, and whenever I thought about my nighttime fears, I felt embarrassed. I even felt sorry for Irene because Frank was such a domineering, overbearing personality and I thought she deserved someone nicer.

  Still…

  Even though I liked having a vacation house and I liked Arizona, it was definitely something of a relief when we returned to California and the real world.

  FOUR

  We spent Christmas vacation in Randall, and while Billy and I got to see snow for the first time, the holiday still wasn’t as much fun as it usually was. Ordinarily, we would open our presents Christmas morning and then spend the afternoon with our friends in the neighborhood playing with those presents. But we had no friends here, only our parents and each other, so while Christmas morning was great, the afternoon felt kind of lonely. Frank and Irene came over later in the day with some homemade peanut brittle. It was clear that Irene would have dropped off the present, said “Merry Christmas” and left, but, once again, Frank overstayed his welcome. He still had a staring problem, and if my parents didn’t notice it, Billy and I did, and we went outside as quickly as was polite to play with a remote-controlled Jeep that Santa had given Billy.

  We were happy to go back to California the day after New Year’s.

  Summer was slightly better because we were allowed to invite friends. My friend Kenny was scheduled to come first, and he stayed for a week. He drove over with our family, and his parents picked him up the following weekend on their way to the Grand Canyon. In between, we hiked and hung out, and actually met a kid named Wyatt who lived down the street. Billy’s friend Luke was supposed to come over a few weeks later, but I guess the trip was too far for his parents, and they called to cancel a few days prior.

  It was near the end of August that Frank and Irene announced they would be moving. Frank said he’d been offered a job by IBM, because the company wanted him to help reorganize one of their facilities in San Francisco. Even Billy didn’t believe that, but both he and I were glad Frank was leaving. Although we’d seen him less this summer, our interactions with him had been ever more uncomfortable. It even seemed sometimes that he purposely waited to drive into town until Billy and I were walking, just so he could offer us a ride. My new friend Wyatt, from down the street, thought Frank was weird as well, and he said that his dad told him Frank was leaving town because he “had to.” What that meant, we weren’t sure, but it didn’t matter. The important thing was that Frank would be gone.

  Irene would be gone, too, and I was glad of that as well. She was a nice woman, and I felt sorry for her, being married to Frank and all, but I still had occasional nightmares about her, and the last one had been a doozy. In it, I was lost in a maze, wandering endlessly through pitch black corridors with only a faltering flashlight to provide illumination. Hearing an odd susurration behind me, I turned, shone the flashlight—and saw Irene crawling on the floor toward me, her eyes wide and white, her mouth an open black hole. I awoke sweating and ready to scream.

  The For Sale sign went up in front of Frank’s house a few days later. It said “For Sale By Owner”—“Why should I pay someone else to do what I can do better?” he told my dad—and it sat there ignored for the next two weeks, with not a single person stopping by to look.

  “Maybe you’ll still be here when we come back,” my dad said before we returned to California.

  “No,” Frank said. “I need to be in San Francisco by October first.”

  “What if the house doesn’t sell by then?”

  “Oh, it’ll sell,” Frank promised.

  “Well,” my dad said, holding out his hand. “Keep in touch. And thanks for everything.”

  “I have your address and phone number,” Frank said.

  That made me feel weird. It was a gut reaction, but, glancing over at Billy, I could tell he felt the same, and the two of us hurried back into the house before our dad made us say goodbye and shake Frank’s hand.

  Frank not only had our California phone number, he used it. A month after we’d returned, he called my dad to tell him that he and Irene had sold the house. The problem was, he said, that movers were taking all of their furniture to San Francisco on Monday, but the deed transfer papers were to be signed the following Wednesday, and he wouldn’t have the money in hand until that Friday.

  “So either we sleep on the bare floor of our empty house,” he told my dad, “or we waste money on a motel, or…well, I hate to even bring it up, but I was wondering if we could rent your house for the week. It’d be handy for us because it’s right across the street, and Irene could clean our place up and get it ready for the new owners, and it’d give you a little extra cash, say, a hundred dollars?”

  “Of course,” my dad said. “After all you’ve done for us…”

/>   “I’ll winterize your house before we leave so your pipes won’t burst, and I promise we’ll be as careful with your place as we would with our own.”

  “I trust you,” my dad said.

  ****

  The call came shortly after breakfast the next day.

  Someone had broken into our house.

  Mom, Billy and I heard my dad’s side of the conversation, so we pretty much knew what had happened, but he filled in the details as soon as he hung up. Apparently, Frank and Irene had gone over to our house with their clothes and toiletries, intending to use the key we’d left them to let themselves in, when they discovered that the door was unlocked. Walking inside, they saw that a floor lamp had been knocked over, and books and knickknacks had been swept off their shelves and onto the floor. The cupboard doors in the kitchen were all open. Nothing had been stolen as far as Frank could tell—the TV and stereo were both still there—but he called the sheriff and filed a report. The sheriff’s office was going to leave the file open until we got there and could verify ourselves whether anything was missing. Unfortunately, he and Irene were leaving in two days, and since there was no way my dad could get over to Randall until the weekend, they were going to miss each other. But Frank said he would leave the sheriff’s report on our kitchen counter, along with his new phone number in San Francisco, in case we needed to get ahold of him.

  “They didn’t steal anything?” my mom repeated.

  My dad shrugged. “Teenagers, probably. Most likely, they broke in and had a party. Besides, we don’t really have much worth stealing. Most of our stuff there is secondhand. Not the kind of thing thieves are looking for.”

  My dad wanted to drive over to Arizona alone on Saturday and speed back on Sunday, but my mom wanted to see the damage for herself, so we all ended up going, leaving about three o’clock Saturday morning and arriving in Randall just before noon.

  Wyatt must have seen our car coming up the street, because he and his brother rode up on their bikes and were putting down their kickstands just as we had gotten out and were walking toward the deck. “I thought you guys were selling the place,” Wyatt told me.

  I shook my head.

  “Then why were you selling all your furniture?”

  I frowned, not understanding. “What?”

  Then I heard my mom’s startled gasp as my dad opened the door to the house.

  “What the hell?” my dad said.

  Billy and I hurried up the steps of the deck, Wyatt and his brother following. Inside, the house had been cleaned out. Our couch was gone. So was the coffee table. A chair and a freestanding lamp were still there, but an end-table and the lamp that had been on top of it were not. The TV and stereo were missing.

  Mom wandered inside, stunned. “Where is everything?”

  I turned toward Wyatt.

  “That’s what I was talking about. Frank had a garage sale and was selling your stuff. That’s why I thought you weren’t coming back.”

  “He what?” Dad’s face was so red I thought he was going to have a heart attack. Wyatt backed away from the fury in his voice.

  “It’s okay,” I told him. “My dad’s not mad at you.”

  “No. I’m not.” Dad took a deep breath.

  “Yeah, Frank had a garage sale in your drive there. For two days. I thought you guys knew. I thought you told him to do it.”

  “Did you buy anything?” I asked.

  Wyatt shook his head. “We didn’t. I don’t know who did, but some people around here might have.”

  My mom was shaking her head. “I can’t believe Irene would go along with something like that. Unless Frank…”

  “I’m filing a report with the sheriff,” my dad declared. “Don’t touch anything. It’s all evidence.”

  Billy had already run upstairs to see if any of our stuff was gone, and I followed him.

  “Don’t touch anything!” Dad called out.

  Luckily for us, the loft seemed to be untouched. Our posters were where they should be, our beds were there, our dresser, Billy’s toys, my books and videotapes. I hurried back down. “Nothing’s missing,” I told my parents. “I don’t think he went upstairs.”

  “Thank God,” Mom breathed.

  “Fat old bastard probably couldn’t get up there,” Dad muttered. He used the phone to call the sheriff’s department, and two cars were in our driveway ten minutes later. Wyatt and his brother had gone home, but we were waiting for the sheriff on the deck, my dad adamant that we not touch anything in case there were clues or fingerprints. Of course, Frank had lied—he’d never filed a report about the “robbery”—but it turned out that he was not unknown to law enforcement.

  “Ask anyone in town,” Frank had said proudly when my dad had originally questioned him about whether he had the construction skills to build a house, implying that he was well known for the quality of his work. My parents had never done so, but they definitely should have, because we learned now that, in Randall, Frank was famous—or infamous—for being a braggart and a liar who had performed shoddy construction work on a number of houses in the area. He owed money to several people for jobs he hadn’t finished after being paid ahead of time, and there were accusations that he had stolen building materials from several homes that he’d worked on. I remembered Wyatt saying that his dad had told him Frank was moving because he “had to,” and that made sense to me now.

  Dad told the sheriff and his deputies everything he knew: that Frank and Irene were supposedly moving to San Francisco, that Frank said he’d been hired by IBM, that Frank’s in-laws, George and Betsy Robertson, lived somewhere in the Valley.

  “Betsy Robertson?” the sheriff said. “She used to be the secretary down at the town hall. I know old Betsy. Didn’t know she was related to Frank, though.” He shook his head, chuckling. “Bad break.”

  We all exchanged glances. We’d been told the Robertsons lived in the Phoenix area. Why would Frank lie about that? Why would George and Betsy let him?

  We went to see the Robertsons immediately after the sheriff’s men left, getting their address from the local phone book. It turned out they lived in the poorer section of Randall, in a battered trailer behind the downtown. Our whole family drove over, parking in the weeds on the side of the dirt road that ran past their trailer. I’d expected the sheriff’s deputies to beat us there, but questioning Frank’s in-laws didn’t seem to be high on their list of priorities, because there was no sign of the law.

  We walked through the yardful of dried thistles to the front door, Dad knocking firmly on the metal until it was opened by Betsy. “Yes?” she said, then, recognizing us, “Oh, you’re the people who bought the lot! Come in, come in.”

  The interior of the trailer looked like my grandparents’ house: flower-print couches, generic landscape pictures on the walls, shag carpet.

  “We have some questions about Frank,” Dad said.

  We heard a disgusted groan from the other side of the room, where George was reclining in an easy chair. “What’s he done now?”

  “He robbed our house and skipped town.”

  George and Betsy looked at each other.

  My dad explained it all, from Frank’s announcement that he’d gotten a job with IBM in San Francisco, to his offer to pay rent to stay in our house for a week, to the “robbery” Frank claimed to have discovered.

  George looked tired. “At least they told you they were going. Neither of them said word one to us. We found out they moved on Tuesday when Betsy called up Irene to get a pound cake recipe from her.”

  “I got that weird noise and the message that said the line was no longer in service.”

  “So I drove over there to tell Frank and Irene their phone was having problems and…they were gone. I saw a ‘For Sale’ sign in front of the house. Frank had come over a week before to borrow a socket set, and he hadn’t even said an
ything about it.”

  “Irene’s your sister, right?” Mom asked Betsy. “And she didn’t tell you they were moving?”

  “Told us nothing. Never heard about that job or San Francisco or…anything.” She seemed upset, almost as though she was about to cry.

  George looked at her sympathetically. “Don’t worry, dear. She’ll call.”

  “Has Frank ever done anything like this before?” Dad asked. “Has he ever stolen things from people?”

  The two of them shared a glance. We all caught it.

  “Is that a yes?”

  “I don’t know,” George confessed. “I’ve wondered sometimes.” He gestured about him. “Frank’s helped us remodel the place several times, even built a storage shed in the back and added a laundry room off the kitchen. He told us the materials were left over from other jobs that he’d done, but…I always wondered if maybe he didn’t steal them.”

  “Frank was never the same after the war,” Betsy admitted. “Oh, he was always Frank, but…something happened to him in Vietnam, something changed him. He never would talk about it—to hear him tell it, he had a great time over there, was a big hero and was responsible for many successful missions—but when he got back, he was different. More secretive, I guess. He was always up for socializing and always one with a good story, but he kept himself, his real self, more private than he had before. At least, that’s the way it seemed to me.”

  “That’s it exactly,” George agreed. “I’ve known Frank since we were in grade school. He was always a bit of a rascal, a smart-ass even, pardon my French, but after the war…” He shook his head. “There was a darkness in him after the war.”

  “And the way he treated Irene sometimes…” Betsy sighed sadly.

  Billy nudged me with his elbow. This was getting at it. This was the Frank we’d known, the one who’d made us so uncomfortable that we’d rather walk a mile up a hilly road on a hot day than spend three minutes in a truck with him.