The Handyman Read online

  I was informed by a doctor that she had had both a heart attack and a stroke, and that the stroke had affected not only her cognitive abilities but some of her organ functions. The doctor gave it to me straight: she was not expected to live, and even if she did, the brain damage she’d suffered was irreversible and no amount of rehab could bring back what had been lost.

  Mom had the eyes of a miserable dog, sad helpless eyes that stared up at me and seemed to be pleading for an end to this agony, although at that point I’m not sure she even knew who I was. I thought of the people I’d seen on the news who advocated for euthanasia, who fought entrenched medical bureaucracies and lengthy court cases in order to relieve their loved ones’ suffering through assisted suicide, and I realized that I wasn’t one of those people. As selfish as it might be, I didn’t want my mom to die; I wanted her to stay alive as long as possible. At the same time, I wanted to let the hospital handle everything. I was content to just be there and hold her hand and not have to do any of the thinking.

  She hung on for three endless days, days in which I slept in the chair next to her and left only to go to the bathroom, grab a quick bite to eat from the hospital cafeteria, or rush home to take a quick shower and change my clothes. She couldn’t have been in much pain because they kept her heavily sedated at all times. For all intents and purposes, Room D of the ICU had been turned into a hospice, and I was with her when she passed away. The doctors and nurses told me it was coming—their instruments recorded the failing of her body—and I remained in place, holding her hand, speaking soothingly to her, though I had no idea if she could understand me.

  They had turned off the sound on the monitors so I would not have to hear that maddening beeping, but I could see the line graphs diminish from mountain peaks to small foothills, and at the moment all of the lines went flat, I felt a sudden heavy limpness in her hand and saw that her chest had stopped moving.

  She was dead.

  Both of my parents were dead.

  Would they still have died if Billy had survived? There was no way to know, but so many variables would have changed over so many years that I found it hard to believe that my mom would have been in the exact same physical condition she was today, or that my dad would have been driving in his car at the exact time that the unlicensed driver who hit him would have sped through that intersection.

  In other words, they’d probably still be alive.

  It was a notion I’d had before, but that was a dangerous line of thinking, and each time the idea intruded upon my thoughts, I pushed it away, not wanting to get bogged down in an endless spiraling chain of what-if scenarios.

  Even if Billy had lived and they had each died at the same time in the same way, I would have had someone to share it with. Billy would have been experiencing the same loss, and we could have gone through it together. But I was all alone, untethered in the world after watching the last of my family pass away before my eyes.

  “She’s in a better place,” an overweight nurse told me as she and the doctor began unhooking the equipment.

  I wanted to cry. I wanted to smack the pious look of pity off the nurse’s face. I wanted to scream out my frustration and demand that someone else’s mother be taken instead because I had already given enough in this life. I wanted to run out of the room and out of the hospital and drive away, never looking back. But I shut it all down. Before I allowed any emotion to take hold, while the numbness still remained, I shut it all down.

  I shut it down.

  SIX

  It had been years since I’d thought about Frank, but after showing Brad and Connie that cabin in Big Bear, it all came back, and I knew I had to talk to Brad’s mother.

  Frank House.

  On Monday morning, I met with the couple at my office back in Orange County. I’d been trying to think of a way to get Brad’s mother’s phone number or address, but luckily for me, she was co-signing the loan with them, so I had all the information I needed in the paperwork. Pretending it was related to the sale, I called her the minute the two of them left my office, making an appointment to meet her at her house in Tarzana. It was the house I really wanted to see, and she agreeably allowed me to meet her at her home.

  There was construction on the Santa Ana Freeway and a traffic jam on the 101, but I’d given myself plenty of time and still arrived a few minutes early. The house, I saw, as I pulled up to the curb in front, was a single-story structure set back from the street. In what may or may not have been a freaky coincidence, it was painted the same red barn color and had the same white trim as Frank’s old house in Randall.

  I got out of the car, pressed the button on my key to lock it, and walked up to the front porch. Before I could even ring the bell, the door was opened by an elderly woman with a heavily made-up face, dressed in tight brightly colored clothes far too young for her age. “Are you Mr. Martin?”

  I nodded my acknowledgment. “And you must be Mrs. Simmons.”

  “Call me Sandy.” She opened the door wider. “Come in. Would you like something to drink?”

  “No, thank you,” I said politely. Stepping over the threshold, I glanced casually around the living room in which I found myself.

  And stared at the walls with a shock of recognition.

  They were covered in our wallpaper.

  I identified the pattern immediately, though I hadn’t seen it in decades.

  Re-experiencing a smell associated with childhood could bring back a flood of forgotten memories, I knew, but the sight of that wallpaper did exactly the same thing for me. Seeing it again, looking at those beige southwestern designs on that off-white background, made me feel like I was a kid again, on vacation in Arizona with my family, and I was instantly overcome by a profound sense of loss.

  The emotion must have shown in my face because Sandy Simmons was suddenly looking at me with an expression of concern. “Are you all right?”

  I forced myself to smile. “Fine,” I said. “I’m fine.” Glancing away from the wallpaper, I looked through a doorway into the kitchen. There was something about the doorway…

  The frame.

  Yes. I’d seen it before, too, though it took me a moment to realize where.

  In George and Betsy’s trailer home.

  I was surprised I’d even noticed such a detail, but I had, and for some reason its appearance had stayed with me. I hadn’t been able to identify it at the time, but as a realtor, I now recognized it as distressed wood trim, of a type that had been very popular thirty years before.

  Were these just coincidences? I didn’t think so. As with the Goodwins’ house, Frank had apparently taken bits and pieces from projects on which he’d worked—our A-frame, George and Betsy’s trailer—and used them in the construction of this building. I looked around. How many other things, I wondered, had been stolen from jobs that he’d been hired to do?

  Not sure of how to broach the subject, I held out the folder I’d been carrying, my ostensible reason for coming over. I’d Xeroxed all documents pertaining to Sandy’s co-signing of her son’s loan, and though it was a lie and totally unnecessary, I told her I needed her initials on several pages. We sat down on the couch, I took out a pen and handed it to her, then flipped through the documents and had her initial the bottom of sheets where Brad and Connie had signed.

  Casually, as though making small talk, I said, “Brad mentioned that this was a Frank house.”

  She laughed. “You’d have to know some family history to get that one…”

  “We had a Frank house,” I said. “In Arizona. When I was little.” I gestured toward the walls. “In fact, that’s our wallpaper. Frank must have stolen it so he could use it for his own house here.”

  Sandy was no longer laughing, and when she spoke I detected an uneasiness that hadn’t been there a moment before. “That was Frank,” she said.

  I told her the tale of our vacat
ion home and the Goodwins’ house, leaving out the parts about the dead dogs, the boy’s skeleton and Billy’s death, but leaving in Frank’s stolen furniture garage sale, and the fact that he’d taken our paneling and used it in his own house. I let her know what we’d learned about Frank from others in town after he’d left.

  Sandy didn’t seem surprised by any of it. She leaned forward. “I never told Brad this because it would’ve freaked him out, but underneath all that wallpaper, when the laundry room collapsed, there were bones. Animal bones—cats, guinea pigs, what have you—but a lot of them. Like someone had been killing pets for years and storing their bodies under the house.”

  “Frank,” I said.

  She nodded. “I think so. Don’t ask me why I think so, but I do.” She shivered. “There was something…not quite right about that man. I never trusted him. My husband didn’t either. Oh, we joked about him and made fun of him, especially about what a terrible builder he was, but I think we were also a little…I don’t know. Nervous isn’t the right word, but it’s close. Even if he had stayed nearby, I don’t think we would have asked him to fix any of his problems. He was an uncomfortable man to be around, if you know what I mean.”

  I did.

  “The stare,” I said.

  “You noticed it, too!” She laughed again. “Yeah, he would always stare at you in that weirdo way when you were talking to him.”

  “And there were those big pauses.”

  “Right,” she said, “as though he was translating whatever you said into a foreign language that only he understood.” There was no laughing now, only remembrance of Frank’s odd behavior.

  I took a deep breath, decided to plunge in. “There were dead dogs under our house,” I said quietly. “And the house across the street, Frank’s house, the one he lived in, had the body of a dead boy walled up in the basement. Well, not a body exactly, more of a skeleton. He’d been dead a long time.”

  Sandy looked stunned.

  I explained how the Goodwins had found the dead boy, how both Frank, his wife and his in-laws had disappeared, how his in-laws’ trailer home had exploded, and how the police had never found hide nor hair of any of them. I gestured around. “And then, all these years later, I find that Frank Watkins moved here, built another house and did exactly the same thing.”

  “Watkins?” Sandy said, frowning. “His name was Warwick. Frank Warwick.”

  A fake name. This was a new wrinkle. But not entirely surprising.

  I shrugged. “Maybe that’s why they couldn’t track him down.”

  She waved away that suggestion. “Criminals use aliases all the time, and they’re caught. My bet is that your small town police force was just incompetent. I mean, here he was, only one state away and starting all over again.”

  She got no argument from me. “Did you meet his wife when you bought the place?”

  Sandy put a hand to her cheek. “Oh, the poor thing! I felt so sorry for her. She seemed browbeaten, living with that man.”

  “Irene was her name, wasn’t it?”

  “You know, I think you’re right. Irene. That sounds familiar. But Frank was the one we remembered. What a blowhard! Even without all—” She waved her hand around. “—this, he was so obnoxious that I couldn’t have forgotten him. Which reminds me, do you want to see the house? I could take you around.”

  It was why I’d come, and I followed her, noting with my realtor’s eye a hodgepodge of styles, due no doubt to the variety of stolen materials used in the building’s construction. In the hallway, I recognized wainscoting from the Goodwins’ house.

  Frank’s house.

  We walked to the master bedroom. “Do you happen to know where he moved?” I asked. “Did he tell you or your husband anything about his plans?”

  “Funny you should say that. He was bragging to Stephen that he was going to Detroit, that one of the big automakers had been impressed by an idea he had to make their workplace more efficient and he’d been hired as a consultant at some outrageous salary. I probably wouldn’t have remembered that, except Irene let slip that she wasn’t looking forward to moving to Las Vegas because she hated the heat and wasn’t a big fan of gambling. The men were talking in the living room, and us women were over in the kitchen, but sound carries, and as soon as she said that, Frank shot her the hardest look I’d ever seen in my life. She immediately shut up. Honestly, it was like he wanted to kill her. She was such a frail, frightened little thing to begin with, and she seemed happy to have someone to talk to, but as soon as she let that cat out of the bag, she shut her mouth and never said another word.” Sandy shook her head. “It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he beat her after that, because that’s what it looked like he wanted to do, and that’s what it looked like she was afraid of. Anyway, I never forgot that, and if you ask me, I think they moved to Las Vegas. Although, for some reason, he wanted us all to think he was moving to Detroit. Like I said, I never trusted that man.”

  We stepped into the master bedroom. It was larger than I’d expected, and nicely furnished. The adjoining bathroom contained both a sunken tub and a shower. But I didn’t like it. I didn’t like any of it, and after a quick inspection, I moved back into the hall. Sandy led me into what had been Brad’s old bedroom, but was now her “workspace.” There was a long table covered with assorted crafts in various stages of assembly, a treadle sewing machine, and a desk piled high with scrapbooks. It was the type of room Irene would like, I thought with a shiver. In my mind, I saw her ancient wrinkled face, and as though I were a child, goosebumps popped up on my arms.

  Was Frank still alive? I wondered.

  That was the question. If he was, he would have to be in his nineties—he’d been old even when I was a kid—but that made no difference to me. I didn’t care if he was on his deathbed. The lying, cheating bastard had killed my brother, and I wanted to confront him. Maybe the law couldn’t prosecute him (or maybe it could, I thought hopefully), but there might be something I could do to make his last years miserable.

  It wasn’t just a question of whether Frank was alive, however. That wasn’t the reason I’d needed to see the house. There was something else. Something that had always been in the back of my mind, but that I’d refused to acknowledge. Mark Goodwin had told me the first day I’d met him that his house was haunted. I’d believed him, without question—I’d sensed it myself—but to me it hadn’t been the presence of ghosts that had made the house feel that way, it was the fact that it had been built by Frank. There’d been the same sort of off-kilter feeling to our own house, though it had taken me awhile to notice it. I believed it was the cause of the nightmares I’d had, and I believed it had led to the bad luck that had followed us since we’d first set foot in that A-frame.

  There was nothing logical or rational about the notion, and to be honest, it was more of a vague feeling than an actual belief, but it was one of the reasons I was here.

  I was getting the same vibe from this place.

  “This is going to sound crazy,” I said. “But did you ever suspect that your house was, well…haunted?”

  It was a long time before she responded, which told me the answer even before she vocalized it. “I think it is,” she said. “I’ve always thought it was. When we first moved in, I had a hard time sleeping. I’d hear noises at night, like people moving around in rooms that I knew were empty. I’d get up to go to the bathroom, and I’d hear silverware clinking in the kitchen, as though someone was eating. Or I’d be lying in bed, and I’d hear the laundry room door open. Things like that. Wind, too. I’d feel cold breezes sometimes. Once, I even thought I saw something, a kind of shadow in my dresser mirror.”

  “Why didn’t you move out? Why don’t you move out?” I realized that that sounded like a self-serving suggestion coming from a realtor, but it wasn’t meant that way, and that was not how she took it.

  Sandy shrugged. “I guess I just g
ot used to the place. I pretended nothing was happening for Brad’s sake—have to be strong in front of kids, you know—and after awhile it became like background noise. Nothing ever happened. Not really. I never felt threatened or in danger, so I just ignored what I heard or what I saw. Or what I thought I heard or thought I saw. Nothing ever actually hurt me.”

  “Your floor collapsed,” I pointed out. “That could have killed you.”

  I was thinking of Billy.

  “I suppose,” she acknowledged, “but it was so long after the fact, that I never even put it together with…that other stuff.”

  “Until now,” I prodded.

  She sighed heavily. “Until you brought it up.” She looked at me soberly. “Was your house haunted?” she asked. “Was Frank’s old house?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I think they were.”

  In the silence following my admission, I heard what sounded like a light knocking coming from within the room’s closet. In my mind, I saw Irene, older than old, standing inside the closet and tapping on the door with a long witch-like finger. Sandy met my eyes, and I knew she heard it, too. The rapping continued. It probably had some perfectly logical, utterly ordinary explanation—air in the water pipes, a barometric differential causing a wooden beam to expand and contract, a mouse in the walls—but I was afraid to open the door, afraid to check, and we left the room, walking back down the hall toward the front of the house.

  “So it still goes on,” I said.

  Sandy nodded. “Yes, it does.”

  SEVEN

  Seeing the Simmons house and hearing Sandy’s stories about Frank got me thinking. Before this moment, I had never had any desire to return to Randall, but now I was curious. I wanted to see the town. I wanted to see our old vacation home.

  I wanted to find out more about Frank.

  There it was. I didn’t know why, or what I could possibly hope to learn, but maybe if I saw those locations through adult eyes, from a more worldly perspective, I’d find something out about the man that I hadn’t known before. There was a nagging feeling at the back of my brain, a sense that if I could understand who Frank was or why he did what he did, I might be able to find him. And make sure he was punished for his crimes.