The Handyman Read online

  I found myself wondering if Sandy Simmons had any paperwork from when she and her husband had bought the house from Frank, thinking the title transfer alone might give me some information to work from, and I called to ask. She wasn’t answering, but I left a voice mail and told her to call me back at her earliest convenience. Fudging the truth a little, I hinted that the reason for the call had something to do with her son’s purchase of the cabin, thinking that it might make the call seem more urgent.

  It was Brad who called me back, nearly two days later. I could tell from the tone of his simple greeting, “This is Brad Simmons,” that he was distracted and upset by something far more important than a glitch in his sales paperwork.

  “Thanks for returning my call,” I told him, “but, actually I needed to speak with your mother.”

  “She’s not here,” he said, and the hesitation that followed let me know that he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to tell me any details. “She’s in the hospital,” he said finally.

  “Oh my God,” I said. “What happened?”

  Another pause. “The house collapsed. While she was sleeping. It just…the roof just fell in on her.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “She’s in a coma.”

  It was the Frank influence. I knew it in my bones—

  bones

  —though there was no way in hell I could prove it to anyone.

  I shivered. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I hope she gets better.” I had no idea if that was stupid and insensitive to say under the circumstances, but it was the only thing that came to me. I found myself wondering how the roof had collapsed. In my mind, I saw it spontaneously crumpling at a focal point directly above Sandy’s bed.

  It was, I realized, the second time the house had tried to kill her.

  “What were you calling about?” Brad asked. “What did you need? It sounded like—”

  “It’s nothing,” I assured him. “Just a question I had, and it’s already been taken care of. I’m sorry to bother you at a time like this. Really. Everything’s fine.”

  “Okay.” He didn’t sound entirely convinced, but I swore again that there were no last minute problems with the sale and promised to call him if anything came up.

  “Don’t worry about a thing on this end,” I told him. “Just take care of your mom.”

  I hung up, feeling shaky.

  The talk of houses left me wondering once again what had happened to the Goodwins. Had Mark and his family endured accidents and problems and tragedies like everyone else who’d lived in a Frank house? I had a feeling they had, and part of me wanted to know the details, but part of me didn’t.

  I decided to put off looking for Mark until I could gain some emotional distance. Hearing about Sandy Simmons had shaken me, and while it could have been a completely random accident, unconnected to anything else, I didn’t think that was the case. At the very least, it was Frank’s poor construction skills that had led to the roof’s collapse, and whether or not there was a supernatural element involved, it was still Frank’s doing that had led to this.

  I redoubled my search efforts, and they finally began to pay off. A Frank Watson in a town called Biscuitville, Texas, had transferred ownership of his house to someone else in 1976. A Frank Wilson in Bernalillo, New Mexico, had sold his small ranch house in 1982. Someone named Frank Wilton had bought, remodeled and sold a fixer upper in Las Vegas in 1993. I found eight homes all together, eight possibilities. There were pictures of most of these properties from subsequent sales with legitimate realtors, and from all of them I got the same vibe I got from Frank’s Randall house, from our vacation home, from Sandy Simmons’ place: the sense that there was something off, something wrong, something weird.

  Were all of these Franks him? And which, if any, was his real last name? George and Betsy would know, if—

  George and Betsy.

  I stared at my computer screen. Of course. George and Betsy. I thought for a moment. There’d been no bodies in that propane explosion, and, knowing the Randall Sheriff’s department, even if they had tried to track down the couple, they probably hadn’t put too much effort into it. It was quite possible they were still alive somewhere. They’d both be old, really old, but if they were alive I still might be able to track them down. I knew their last name, Robertson, and while it wasn’t that unique, there probably weren’t too many George and Betsy Robertsons who were married to each other.

  Unless they’d changed their names, too.

  I slumped in my chair, disappointed.

  Of course they had.

  Still, it couldn’t hurt to check, and I spent a couple of hours using every program, app and website at my disposal to try and find them.

  Nothing.

  Feeling defeated, I scrolled back through the real estate photos I’d saved. They definitely seemed like Frank houses. They had that feeling, though no two looked alike. The one in Texas was two stories and sort of Victorian looking. It seemed far too professionally built to be all Frank, and I wondered if he’d been working for a construction company at the time or if he’d simply remodeled an already existing structure. The one in Las Vegas was little more than a shack, a small ramshackle one-story building that reminded me of a third-world slum dwelling. He could have definitely built that. One, in Pocatello, Idaho, was a double-wide trailer with an added-on carport.

  Like George and Betsy’s.

  I stared at the picture. The more I thought about George and Betsy, the more suspect they seemed to be. First there was that story about them living in Phoenix and buying our original lot as an investment. They hadn’t lived in Phoenix, we’d found out from the sheriff; they’d been longtime residents of Randall, and Betsy had been a secretary at the town hall. So why had they lied? And why had they bought the lot and why had they sold it? Then there was that thing about Frank and Vietnam, how he’d come back changed. Maybe he had, but if he actually was “Frank Watson,” he hadn’t come back to Randall but to Biscuitville, Texas—and had apparently moved to several states in between. There was also the mysterious explosion that had destroyed the Robertsons’ trailer. Had they set it? Had Frank set it? Why? And why had they disappeared after that?

  I wondered if either of them were even related to Frank or Irene.

  The confusing part was that there seemed to be threads of truth woven through the lies, so it was impossible for me to tell where the lies ended and the truth began.

  Between showing houses, I kept up my search.

  I’m not sure when exactly I decided to take a leave of absence, but I started calculating expenses vis-a-vis my bank account, and at some point made the decision that I could afford to take some time off and check out some of these Frank houses in person. I needed to see them for myself, and I honestly thought I might be able to ascertain his whereabouts (or his fate, if he were dead) from what I might learn by visiting those locations and talking to people who’d been entangled with him. It had become an obsession, this search. I realized that, understood it on an intellectual level, but on an emotional level it was still something I felt compelled to do. All of my feelings involving Frank had been bottled up since Billy’s “accident,” since the deaths of my dad and my mom, and everything had started leaking out when I learned that Brad had grown up in a Frank house, that I was not the only one, that the man had kept on doing what he did long after Randall. I told myself that I might be in a position to not only see that he was punished for his past crimes but make sure that he was stopped so he could never do it again.

  I made an itinerary. The houses were literally all over the map, and if I were going to do this, I had to decide how I wanted to proceed, where I wanted to go first: I could visit the houses in chronological order, or in reverse chronological order, or closest-to-farthest, or farthest-to-closest. Eventually, I decided to begin with Las Vegas. It was the one real lead I had, the one house, thanks t
o Sandy Simmons, that I was almost positive was his, and it happened to be the one nearest Southern California.

  I hadn’t seen Teri for almost a week, and I felt guilty about that. We’d kept in contact primarily by text, talking only once or twice over the phone. Our last actual meeting had not even been a date or a dinner or a long conversation but a quickie in the bathroom of the real estate office at lunch on Monday. She needed it, I needed it, we had a very limited amount of time, so she dropped by when everyone else was out, we locked the bathroom door, I pulled her pants down, slipped on a condom, bent her over the sink and took her quickly from behind. She was gone before anyone else in the office returned.

  If I was going to be gone for awhile, I needed to tell her, and I needed to do so in person rather than over the phone, or through a text or email. I owed her that much.

  We met at a Chili’s located in the parking lot of a mall. Inside, the place was crowded. On the opposite side of the restaurant, as we walked in, waitresses were singing “Happy Birthday” to an old man surrounded by his family. The waitresses presented the old man with a brownie topped by a single burning candle. “Make a wish!” his family exhorted him. “Make a wish!”

  We sat down in a booth suggested by the overenthusiastic server. I’d always hated restaurants like this, but they were part and parcel of the world I lived in, the glad-handing realm of real estate, and not for the first time I wondered how I had ended up in this life.

  It was probably because of Billy.

  Probably because of Frank.

  But there was time enough later to feel sorry for myself and bemoan my off-track existence. Right now, I needed to let Teri know that I would be gone for awhile.

  “I need to go on a business trip,” I lied.

  “Where?” she asked, curious.

  “Nevada, maybe Texas, New Mexico...”

  “Road trip?” she said. “Sounds like fun.”

  The expression on her face was one of eager anticipation, and I realized with a sinking feeling that she thought I was inviting her. Not knowing how to tell her that I didn’t want her to come with me, I said, “It won’t be fun. And I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “I thought you couldn’t get time off.”

  “Things have calmed down. It’s a slack time for us. And I have plenty of vacation days saved up.”

  The waitress stopped by to take our order, animatedly introducing herself and rattling off an impossibly long list of specials. Teri ordered a chicken fajita platter and a margarita, while I just asked for a side order of French fries and an iced tea.

  “Are you sure?” the waitress prodded. “We have—”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  “You don’t—”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  Teri waited until the waitress left. “Not hungry?” She grinned mischievously. “I bet I know something you’d like to eat.” Her eyes glanced almost imperceptibly down at her lap, and I laughed. I was going to miss her sense of humor when I was gone. A sharp small pang of melancholy told me that I was going to miss more than that, and I realized that despite my determination to keep this relationship light and casual, within the past few months it had somehow developed into something deeper.

  Maybe she should come with me.

  No.

  I liked Teri. A lot. Which was why I didn’t tell her about my real mission. I needed to protect her, keep her out of it. And, in a weird way, I needed her to be a kind of anchor, to keep me grounded, to maintain my connection with the real world of jobs and relationships and practical matters so I didn’t go floating off permanently into the nebulous world of quests and ghosts and the mysteries of Frank.

  Besides, I might not come back.

  I don’t know what made me think that, but as soon as I did, I realized that the possibility had always been at the back of my mind. It was behind the feeling of sadness that had been dogging me all day, and it was the real reason I was reluctant to get Teri involved. I was not sure if I thought there was the possibility of physical danger or if I thought something might happen that would cause me to abandon my life and career and never return, but I was filled with the sense that a big change was coming, that after this my life would never be the same.

  It took awhile, but I eventually dissuaded her from coming with me, convincing her to save her vacation days so that we could take a real trip, a fun trip.

  The next day, I called around to find the best deal on the smallest rental car possible, knowing that I might need it for awhile. There were some loose ends that needed to be tied up both at work and at home, and it was another week before I was actually ready to take off. Officially, I would be on leave for one month, but there was the understanding that it could be extended. I shifted my listings and in-process sales to May Lam and Mike Rivera, dividing the workload based on who I thought would do a better job with each individual property, and made sure that everyone in the office had my cell number in case they needed to get in touch with me for anything. After deleting information so there was nothing private on my computer, I gave Mike my password should anyone need to access my files.

  I spent that night at Teri’s, and we tried things we’d never tried before. She couldn’t possibly guess what was really going on, but I think she understood that I was not actually going on a business trip, and she made me promise that I would call and text her every morning and every evening. It was almost as though she, too, had a premonition of danger. But neither of us spoke of that, and we parted the next morning with a kiss, the way we always did.

  For a brief moment, looking out at her through the driver’s side window of the car, I considered inviting her to accompany me—and I could tell that she would say yes—but I knew this was something I needed to do alone.

  Waving, I drove off, headed home, packed my bags, and started for Las Vegas.

  NINE

  The highway was crowded, and what was supposed to be a three hour trip took five. I should have either left earlier or picked a day other than Friday to drive to Las Vegas since a lot of Southern Californians were obviously playing hooky and making this into a three-day weekend.

  I’d been to Vegas only once before, two years ago, to attend a real estate convention, and I hadn’t been impressed. The resorts that looked so spacious and inviting on television commercials had turned out to be right next to rival hotels and directly abut the street, while the strip had seemed to be jammed with perpetual traffic.

  I was looking now for the real Las Vegas, the part of the city where people lived, not the part where visitors came to vacation. I’d programmed the address of Frank Wilton’s house into my GPS, and when I reached the center of town, it told me to take an off-ramp, exit the freeway and head north, away from the strip. In an area bordered by seedy bars and abandoned buildings but marked by new housing developments, I passed two subdivisions under construction and there, between a recently completed gas station and an as-yet-unopened post office, the GPS announced that I’d arrived at my destination.

  Where Frank’s shack had been torn down.

  I guess that was something I should have expected, although the possibility had not even occurred to me. Just as surprising was the fact that nothing had been built in its place. There was only an empty lot, flat and weedy and surrounded by new buildings. I felt a huge disappointment. This was the most recent listing for a “Frank W” house I could find, and I’d been hoping the current owners could tell me where Frank had gone from here, or at least point me in the right direction.

  I’d been in the car for a long time, so even though there was nothing to see, I got out and walked around. I don’t know what I expected—to pick up some sort of creepy vibe from the flat ground? To feel an unseen presence in the open space?—but there was nothing. As far as I could tell, this was an ordinary vacant lot, and though I walked its
length and width, looking down at the ground for some left behind object that might indicate it had once been part of Frank’s house, I did not find anything.

  Still, in this revitalized area, flush with new construction, the spot on which Frank’s house had sat was conspicuously empty.

  That had to mean something.

  Unsure at first what to do, I finally took out my phone, went online and accessed property records for the lot. I found that it was owned by an investment firm, Southwest Land Trust. Calling the number provided and leveraging my real estate credentials, I worked my way up the phone ladder and reached a “property consultant,” who looked up the site for me and said that, yes it had once been owned by a Frank Wilton, but the company had bought it off a subsequent owner and had no information on Mr. Wilton. Southwest Land Trust had had the onsite structure razed in anticipation of building a liquor store at the location but had run into some setbacks. There was nothing weird, nothing mysterious. It was a zoning issue, pure and simple, and since the issues seemed to have been resolved, construction would probably begin soon.

  This was a bust, and I was temporarily thrown, not sure of what to do. In spite of my initial plans, I was tempted to head back to Orange and give it all up. Confronted with the fruitlessness of my efforts, this entire trip suddenly seemed a waste to me. What had I been thinking? I’d gotten so wrapped up in the Frank narrative after learning about the Simmons house in Tarzana, that I’d allowed it to consume my time and energies in what was proving to be a really unhealthy way.