House of Fallen Trees

CHAPTER ONE

Two men have the carcass.

Karen Lewis jolted awake, eyes wide, wondering who had spoken the words. Heart hammering, she gazed around the living room of her condo. She’d fallen asleep on the sofa while watching TV. That much she remembered. The TV was still on, though muted. Blue shadows pranced and chased each other around the ceiling, flickering like the ghosts of flames.

The phone rang loudly — louder, it seemed, than it should have been — giving Karen another start. She stared at it, sitting on a small table across the room, daring it to ring again.

It did.

Eyes darting to the digital clock beside the phone, she saw that it was 12:25 am. Who would be calling at this hour? Maybe Sean?

The thought caused her to leap up and cross the room, snatching the phone from its cradle.

“Hello?”

Static, sounding far away, as though traveling along a crossed line in another state, crackled in her ear. “Hello?” she repeated, raising her voice slightly.

A breeze ruffled her dark hair, fluttering it against her cheeks — a lover’s gentle touch — and she whirled to see that her front door was open to the night.

“What the…”

She let the phone drop into the armchair beside her and moved cautiously towards the door. Was someone in the condo with her? An intruder?

Mouth dry, pulse quickening in her temples, Karen felt a tremor in her hands and forced them into fists to quell her fear.

She knew the smart thing to do would be to get out of there, go next door and pound on her neighbor’s door until she could get in and call the police. But she hesitated at the threshold, looking out at the autumn night, the well-lighted pathway that led to the buildings in this part of the complex. The gated pool just across the well-manicured lawn, still uncovered, the surface rippling ever so slightly.

The night was silent. Not even any of the neighbors’ cats were about, stalking their phantom prey.

Turning around to face inside again, Karen was suddenly certain she was alone. There was no intruder, no rapist, murderer or thief in her home.

She was alone, just as she always was. She had no idea how she knew this, but she did; and when she decided to prove herself right by walking through the rooms of the condo, switching on lights as she went, searching for any sign of a break-in or other disruption, she was pleased that her intuition was once again correct.

Ever since childhood, she had trusted her instincts wherever they may have led, and only seldom had they brought her into the line of trouble. Satisfied the condo was indeed empty, she returned to the living room and closed the front door, flipping the deadbolt with a frown. Had the wind blown it open? It seemed so unlikely…

A crackle of static and she turned back to the receiver of the telephone, still on the chair where she’d left it. The line was still open, still transmitting from Kansas or Oklahoma or Nebraska. Some place that she imagined was desolate, devoid of life and color, especially at this time of night. The lonely hours.

Crossing the room, she grabbed the receiver and tentatively put it to her ear to listen. Just faraway static and maybe…maybe the wind. Karen sighed, began to hang up the phone, but then a voice, mixed so finely into the static it was barely audible, spoke a familiar sentence. Her heart began to crash in her chest once more as she pressed the phone hard into her ear, listening…listening…

And there…there it was again. Far, far away. The voice. A man’s voice, broken up by static and distance and perhaps time and space.

“Two men have the carcass,” he said, quite clearly this time, before the line went dead.

Karen woke to sunshine, curled up on her couch with an embroidered purple throw pillow beneath her head and a plum chenille blanket tossed over her. Outside, she could hear a squawking crow and distantly, passing traffic. She blinked against the glare, glanced at the clock and gasped when she saw it was nearly one in the afternoon. “Holy crap,” she muttered, sniffed and yawned. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept so late. Probably not since her days of heavy drinking.

Slowly, she sat up, tossing the blanket aside. Her mouth felt dry as the surface of the moon. Orange juice, she thought, rising to her feet and padding into the tiny kitchen. She didn’t care about a glass — just grabbed the jug of juice from the refrigerator and carried it back to the couch with her.

She flipped the top off and dropped it to the cushion beside her, tipping the jug up and drinking deeply. Smacking her lips, she gazed without interest at the television. One of those court TV shows she found so annoying was on and she was glad she’d muted the television before falling asleep last night. Jug resting on one thigh, she rubbed sleep out of her eyes with her free hand, tried to remember what day this was. Thursday. Thursday afternoon and all was well. Except for that dream, she thought. That was one fucked up dream, for sure. One for the shrinks, probably, if she’d had a shrink, which she didn’t. Not anymore.

Those days were over. When her brother had gone missing out in Washington State five months before, Karen had pretty much lost it. She’d fallen into the deepest depression she’d ever known — unable to work, sleep, or carry on a decent conversation without eventually bringing the subject back to Sean…without fail.

This habit tended to annoy everyone around her after a while. Even her parents, the two people she felt should understand her grief better than any others. And they did understand for a while. But then they stopped understanding. Stopped wanting to talk about him and what happened to him. Stopped wanting to know, stopped wondering, stopped praying.

But Karen never stopped, didn’t want to stop. It was still too soon. And so she had found a therapist and had dutifully gone to see the woman, once a week, for three solid months.

The therapy had helped. She was able to sleep again, able to recover her lost social skills, be a member of society, and quite successfully covered up her ugly scars no one wanted to see.

She had gotten back to her writing, pounding out a long novel that was, much to her amazement, snatched up by a large publishing house that promised her boatloads of money as well as a huge advance on the next book.

True to their word, a check was cut and sent to her almost immediately. Karen still wasn’t sure what to do with the money. She’d left her crappy apartment and moved into the condo, traded in her geriatric Ford for a shiny new-to-her Cherokee, bought the best computer she could find, complete with all the latest bells and whistles, but beyond that she didn’t know what else she wanted. A bigger, fancier house, with gardens and an indoor swimming pool? A Mercedes? A trip around Europe with her special someone?

None of that was her style and besides, she’d never met that special someone and at twenty-nine was beginning to suspect she never would. Which was fine with her. She was happy with herself, with living alone. Also, she’d been doing it for so long, she just didn’t believe she could tolerate anyone else in her space for very long. She was set in her ways.

But, when she was honest with herself, she had to admit that sometimes she got lonely. Sometimes, while curled up on the couch late at night, watching a spooky movie, she wished she had someone to share the special giddy tingles that came with being scared of something silly and make-believe. Or in bed, during a particularly fierce thunderstorm, someone to cuddle up against would have been nice.

She sighed, drank more OJ. Part of her was tempted to just go back to sleep. She couldn’t think of a reason to be awake right now. Then she remembered her current novel and, more importantly, the deadline for the current novel. Groaning inwardly, she capped the juice and got up to put it away.

Despite not wanting to work — feeling too groggy and discombobulated — she knew she had to. And she knew coffee was the answer. She moved around the kitchen like an automaton, still dressed in yesterday’s clothes, hair wild and sticking up in all directions, needing a good scrubbing, along with the rest of her. Waiting for the coffee to percolate, she pulled at the collar of her T-shirt, tucked her nose down inside towards her armpit and gave it a quick sniff. Not so bad, she decided. A shower could wait a while longer. Get some caffeine into her first, wake up a little, and maybe check her email. All the usual crap she did every day. As she stared at the coffee maker, willing it to brew faster, her mind returned to last night’s dream.

So peculiar.

Two men have the carcass.

What carcass? Which two men? She shivered, folding her arms across her chest. And carcass? What kind of a gruesome word was that? Who even used that word anymore? She plucked a tissue from the box on the counter, blew her nose loudly.

Just the mind of a writer, she thought as she tossed the tissue in the garbage. A creative mind working overtime, just as she had trained it to do. Pick up every little morsel of life, store it away, and pluck it from the heap whenever it may be needed. Remember every little thing, even the most insignificant.

This is what she strove to do in her life, though she knew it was an impossible goal. No one could remember everything and so, whenever she left the condo, she would always carry a pocket notebook with her, to capture and keep anything that struck her fancy. A snatch of dialog overheard in the grocery store. The look of a skater kid as he rolled down the sidewalk on his board. An ancient monolith of a truck tucked into the side yard of a rundown house, overtaken by brambles, rusting away in the sun and the rain, season after season after season. Everything was fodder. Everything was grist for the mill.

Everything, that was, ss fff, except for Sean, and she was working up to that, had promised herself she would get to it, get to him, excavate him from her subconscious and allow herself to live again in a way she hadn’t been able to in the five months he’d been gone.

The coffee finished brewing and she blew her nose again — damn fall allergies — and began to make herself a mug and start another day at the salt mines in her cluttered head.