The Handyman Read online

  For Billy.

  There was a definite pattern, I realized after talking to Sandy Simmons. All of Frank’s houses incorporated stolen materials, and all of them had bodies or bones buried somewhere within their construction. It was a thing with him. There seemed something ritualistic about it, and that led me to the part of all this that I didn’t want to think about.

  The supernatural part.

  I was not a skeptic. No realtor is. We’ve all had encounters with properties that seemed off somehow, that didn’t feel right, houses where we didn’t want to spend time alone, where we quickly put up our signs, set out our flyers and left as fast as possible. But this was less vague, more specific, and the fact that these hauntings, for lack of a better word, were connected to a single person—Frank—made me feel distinctly uneasy.

  But no less determined to get to the bottom of it.

  So I thought I’d take a few days off and drive back to Randall. That was the good thing about being a realtor: the hours were flexible. It had been a tough summer, and I was still treading water financially, but the commission from the Big Bear cabin sale, as small as it was, allowed me at least a little leeway, and once my end of the paperwork was completed and filed, I intended to take a short research trip.

  Two days later, my work done, I decided to speed over to Randall on Friday, returning on Sunday, thinking that would give me enough time to snoop around and see what I could find without significantly impacting my job.

  I left the Lincoln at the office and took my van to meet Teri for lunch at Don Jose’s, intending to tell her of my plans and explain why I had to break our date for Saturday. The Lincoln was a show car, meant to fool clients into thinking I was hugely successful and doing better than I was (luxury cars, even crappy ones with rolled-back odometers like mine, made prospective homebuyers feel comfortable). My actual ride was an eight-year-old Honda Odyssey. I’d bought the van because it was supposed to have a stellar safety record, but mine must have been made on a Monday since it had given me nothing but problems from the get go. My previous vehicle, a Ford Explorer, had lasted over 200,000 miles before I decided to trade it in. But this pile of junk had barely half as many miles on it, and had already had to have the motor mounts replaced twice. Last year, on a trip to San Diego, it had died right in front of the nuclear power plant at San Notre, and I’d had to wait two hours for a tow back to Orange, where I found out that it needed a new transmission. Oh, and a new front axle. When I told my tale of woe to Jim Gibbons at the office, who also happened to have a Honda van, he said, “Yeah, they do seem to have problems with their transmissions.”

  As it turned out, his transmission had been recalled. But when I went online, to see if there was a recall for my year, I found out that it was only for the three years prior. I was out of luck, and I had to shell out nearly two thousand dollars to have my axle replaced and my transmission rebuilt. The damn thing still made mysterious noises when I braked or when I accelerated, so I only drove the van locally.

  Since there was no way it would be able to get me all the way to Arizona, that meant I was going to have to rent a car for the weekend.

  Unless…

  I suddenly had an idea.

  I could convince Teri to come with me and we could go in her car.

  That was a big step, though. Maybe too big. Teri and I had met last year at the birthday party of a friend from college, had hit it off and were now kind of, sort of, almost semi-dating. It was not really anything serious, but a weekend trip in her car would definitely kick the relationship up a few notches. Did I really want that?

  Did she really want that?

  Maybe it would be better to shell out the money for a rental car after all.

  Teri was already at the restaurant when I arrived, waiting for me on a bench outside the front door. She looked damn good, as she always did, and I gave her a quick kiss, put my arm around her waist, and we stepped inside. I ended up telling her about my visit to the Simmons house, and a little about Frank, and about my planned weekend trip to Randall.

  Apparently, she thought I was inviting her. “Oh, I wish I could go,” she said, “but there’s no way I can take off Friday. In fact, I may even have to come in on Saturday.” Teri worked in the IT department of an Orange County-based bank. She put her hand on mine. “Maybe next time?”

  “That’s okay,” I told her, and then the waitress arrived, and we ordered.

  Rental car it was.

  ****

  I remembered large parts of the trip to Arizona. Landmarks. Specific gas stations, even. A McDonald’s in Quartzite where we’d once stopped for lunch. A rest area where Billy had thrown up after seeing an overflowing urinal. The inspection station at the border with its display case of desert bats and bugs.

  A lot had changed since I was a kid. The Phoenix area had grown tremendously and had spread much further into the desert than I would have expected, Subways and Wal-Marts crowding out saguaros and ocotillo on new roads that led to new subdivisions. But the route to Randall was still a two-lane highway, and the town itself had changed hardly at all. On the way in, I saw signs for a new development, The Pines, that apparently offered luxury vacation homes to rich people from the Valley, but that was an anomaly. The lack of jobs in this area had kept the town small, and it was still just as cute as I remembered it. A few of the businesses had changed—the video store was now a Starbucks, and the bakery was now a pizza restaurant—but the essential character of the downtown had remained the same.

  I drove slowly, looking for the turnoff to our old neighborhood, not positive I remembered where it was. Although the clouds in the sky were more white than gray, the streets were wet and the air was filled with a unique scent I hadn’t smelled since childhood: forest rain. I rolled down the car window to better take it in, breathing deeply, feeling happy, feeling sad, recognizing the deep earthy odor of dirt, the lighter smell of fresh pine needles, the clean scent of water, all of it mingled together and suspended in a humidity that was comforting rather than heavy. It brought me back to those monsoon summers we’d spent at our vacation home, and though I’d come here in pursuit of information about Frank, I was suddenly overcome by memories of my dad, my mom and my brother, filled with a feeling of loss so strong that I almost pulled the car over.

  At that moment I saw our street, recognizing it by the ponderosa pine on the corner. Miraculously, it had not been chopped down, although the formerly vacant lot where it stood was now occupied by a two-story house with a two-car garage.

  I turned, heading up the winding road, past trees much taller than I recalled and many more houses than I remembered. I rounded the curve where I’d fallen off my bike, glanced over at the ditch where Mark Goodwin had found the rotting body of a dead raccoon. A powerful sadness settled over me. I had not expected this reaction and wondered if I should turn around and leave. Maybe coming here had been a mistake.

  Then I found our old house—

  —and saw a camera crew out front. With trucks and lights and a crowd of technicians. And a group of neighborhood residents behind a barrier of sawhorses, watching it all.

  What was going on here?

  I pulled to a stop at the side of the road and got out of the car. A couple of heads turned my way, but I was not nearly as interesting as whatever was being filmed, and the few neighbors who’d noticed my arrival decided to ignore me. I walked up to a young man wearing a Weird Al Yankovic t-shirt. “What’s going on?” I asked.

  He said that the crew in front of us was preparing to film an episode of Ghost Pursuers, a basic cable show that purported to investigate “real” haunted houses. I wasn’t familiar with the program, but most of the gathered onlookers seemed to be diehard fans. One of the stars of the show, a man everyone was calling “Petey,” stood just behind the sawhorses answering questions, signing autographs and posing for selfies.

  “Who owns that house?” I as
ked Weird Al, pointing to our old A-frame.

  “No one now. The old guy who lived there killed himself. That’s why they’re here.”

  The news made me feel strange. We’d bought that pre-fab kit. The house had been built for us. We’d spent summers and vacations there, and no matter what cosmetic changes had been added since, I knew every inch of that A-frame intimately. The thought that a man had committed suicide in one of our rooms left me feeling queasy inside. I wanted to hear more specifics, but a man with a megaphone announced “Quiet on the set!” and everyone stopped talking.

  Petey had moved away from his adoring fans and was standing in the center of the street between Frank’s house and ours. “We’re here in Randall, Arizona,” he intoned. “The most haunted town in America.”

  The most haunted town in America? When had that happened?

  “Cut!” the man with the megaphone yelled, and they shot it again, from a different angle, then from another angle, before the megaphone man finally yelled, “Got it!” and workmen started moving equipment onto our old driveway, now covered with blacktop rather than gravel.

  I pushed my way to the front of the crowd. An attractive young woman on the other side of the barricade was texting on her cell phone, and I tapped her on the shoulder. “Excuse me,” I said. “Are you one of the ghost hunters?”

  “Ghost pursuers,” she corrected me. “And yes, I’m Deb,” she said in a tone that indicated I was supposed to know who that was.

  “Well, I know a little bit about that house,” I said. “My family built it. I used to spend my summers here.”

  Deb seemed far less interested in my story than in her texting. She moved forward so I could push a sawhorse aside and pass through the barrier. “The producer and director are over there,” she told me, pointing.

  I walked past a group of men mounting a camera on a track to where a tall man with a gray Sam Elliott mustache was talking to a short, clean-cut younger man wearing earphones around his neck. I assumed they’d be talking about the show, but they weren’t.

  “Korean chicks love anal sex,” the man with the mustache was saying.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s painful and it’s difficult to get through, and they think that makes it worthwhile. It’s a cultural thing.”

  “So your girlfriend…”

  “Every day.” The man’s proud grin faded, and he scowled at my approach. “Who are you and what do you want?” He motioned to someone over my shoulder, indicating that I should be removed.

  “I’m a guy who used to live in that house when I was a kid. My dad had it built for our vacation home. And I know why that house across the street is haunted, also. But if you don’t want to hear about it…” I started to turn away.

  “No! No! We’d love to hear your story!” He waved away the man he’d just called over to kick me out. “What did you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t, and I’m not going to.”

  “That’s fine, that’s fine.” He was gesturing to someone else. Two bearded men in their early to mid-twenties strolled over from where they’d been sitting on nearby chairs. “I’m Scott Spencer, producer of Ghost Pursuers. These are our writers slash researchers, Evan and Owen. Tell them whatever you know—or let them interview you about what you know—and then maybe we can get you on camera as an expert or a local or a local expert or…we’ll figure it out.”

  I wasn’t about to appear on camera. It would erode my professional credibility—no one wanted to buy a home from someone who’d appeared on Ghost Pursuers talking about haunted houses. But I was definitely willing to provide them with background information. I’d never seen the show, and on air the pursuers might pretend to be the height of journalistic integrity, but off the air, the team responsible for the show was desperate for anything that would help them fill time. I could have lied through my teeth and told them a tale about the spawn of Bigfoot and they would have used it. But, as it happened, I was legitimately able to fill in some gaps on stories the researchers had already unearthed. They told me that they were calling Randall “the most haunted town in America” because of these two supposedly haunted houses situated directly across the street from each other, and I relayed the story of Frank and the dead dogs and the dead kid, although I left out any mention of Billy.

  “We can stretch this to two episodes!” the producer said excitedly. “That one house is small, so I didn’t think we could get twenty-two out of it, but with this guy—” He hooked a thumb in my direction. “—we might just be able to put in enough background that it’ll cover up when our specter-cams don’t find anything. Which they never do,” he confided to me.

  Evan and Owen looked at each other. “Two episodes?” Evan said. “I don’t see why not. We’ve done more with less.”

  “Yes!” Spencer shouted. He rubbed his hands gleefully. “This puts us at least half a week ahead! I want two new scripts from you ASAP,” he told Evan and Owen. “Leave the first ten as is. We’ll keep what we have for the initial foray, but prep the pursuers that the rest is being revised.” Barking orders, he headed toward Deb, still texting in front of the crowd, while he motioned for Petey and another man standing on the sidelines to join them.

  According to Evan, Will Grouse, the old man who’d been living in our house, had told friends and family for at least two months before he hanged himself that he’d seen and heard things he could not explain and that he feared he was losing his mind. The place across the street, Frank’s house, already had a reputation for being haunted and had been vacant since the height of the recession, when the last owners had walked away from their mortgage and the bank had foreclosed. It was a neighbor from down the street, where Wyatt used to live, who had emailed Ghost Pursuers about the homes.

  Evan turned to me. “We’ll take you in with us,” he said. “You show us around, let us know where the pursuers should train their cameras, where you found the dead dogs, where… Well, just tell us whatever you can about each room. I understand that you don’t want to be on the show, but if you could feed us some info that another talking head could say, that would be great. Do you know the other house, too?”

  I nodded.

  “Excellent. Then we’ll cover them both.”

  Either sound carried or the producer’s ears were tuned to everything going on around him, because Spencer suddenly left Deb, Petey and the other pursuer and hurried over. “We need you to sign a release before you go in,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because we film everything, every interaction with the location. Hand-held. Just in case we catch something. And if you happen to be in the shot, well, we need your permission if we incorporate it into the broadcast.”

  “No,” I said.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Then you can’t go in.”

  I shrugged. “Then I won’t tell you where the haunted parts are, and you won’t know where to look. I suppose you could probably figure it out by trial and error, but time is money, right?” I met the producer’s eyes. “Your call.”

  “Damn it!” He took a deep calming breath. “Fine. Go in and show them what to look for. But film it,” he ordered his crew. He turned his attention back to me. “If we do see something, maybe you’ll change your mind about participating.”

  “Doubt it.”

  “Make sure you keep him out of it, then. Over the shoulder shots only.”

  With Evan and Owen leading the way, and a pony-tailed cameraman following right behind me, we made our way past a table covered with boxes of donuts, past groups of men setting up equipment, and up the steps to the deck of the A-frame.

  It had been a long time since I’d been here, but the boards felt the same under my feet, and my body’s sense memory moved me forward as though I’d never left and had been living here all my life. The house’s paint was peeling, and a wrought
-iron security door had been added since my day, but the place was far more familiar to me than I would have expected it to be, and I felt a tightening in my gut as Owen held the door open and I walked across the threshold.

  We’d sold the house furnished all those years ago, and, amazingly enough, our bookcase was still there, painted white now instead of stained walnut. The stove was the same, too, although the refrigerator and all of the other furnishings were new to me. The couch was in the same spot as our couch, however, as was the coffee table, and while I knew that the small space offered only a limited decorating range, the continuity still made me feel more at home than I would have expected.

  My eyes kept glancing toward the spot in the hallway where the floor had collapsed.

  Where Billy had been killed.

  “Feel anything?” Evan asked. “Sense anything?”

  I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak. In my mind, I could see my mom in the kitchen, cooking dinner, my dad on the couch reading a book. I felt tears welling in my eyes and forced myself to remain focused on the present. “So where’d the old guy hang himself?” I asked.

  Owen pointed to the stairs leading up to the loft. “There,” he said, “from the top railing.” I wasn’t sure I’d heard the second “writer slash researcher” speak until this point.

  Looking up, I felt something. A slight sense of vertigo as my eyes found the A-frame’s peak. Gooseflesh rippled my arms as I started up the stairs.

  The loft that had been my brother’s and my bedroom was now storage space. A cockroach scuttled under a pile of boxes as I turned on the light.

  There was definitely something here. It might have been from the suicide, it might have existed before, but the feeling in the loft was one of uneasiness. In my mind, unbidden, flashed the image of Irene, wrinkled, skeletal and grinning, hiding behind one of the piles of boxes, waiting for me.