House of Fallen Trees

CHAPTER TWELVE

The night came on like something alive and hungry, scratching at the windows, swirling through the eaves, scrabbling up the outer walls of the house, searching for a way inside. In the kitchen, the three of them sat at a cheap folding table blowing on large bowls of soup, chicken noodle for Rory and vegetable for Karen and Saul.

After the first spoonful, Karen said, “Now that’s what I’m talking about. Hot soup for a cold night.”

Saul cocked an eyebrow at her. “You do realize it’s only November, don’t you?”

“Yeah, but it’s so chilly,” Karen replied with a shiver.

“I thought you New Englanders were supposed to be a hearty bunch.”

“I suppose. I guess I’m just used to it snowing when it’s this cold.”

“It’s only forty-five degrees, Karen,” Rory told her, joining the conversation. “Maybe you’re coming down with a bug?”

She considered it. “I feel okay.” But that wasn’t entirely true. Physically, she felt fine, except for the chill, but emotionally she was on edge. She didn’t like the way the house was getting darker and no amount of lights seemed to help brighten it. Saul, who sat directly across from her, no more than two or three feet away, remained in shadow, his face obscured when he bent to his bowl. Several times, she’d glanced up at the overhead light, only to get a sharp pain behind her eyes, making her look away with a grimace. And each time she did so, the room seemed that much darker around them. She could feel a headache coming on, which at first she’d assumed was due to hunger, but now that she was eating, she thought it had more to do with the lighting in the house. It was hurting her eyes. She ate hurriedly, not because she was starving but because she was so tired. She figured she still hadn’t adjusted to the time difference and was looking forward to just going up to the room Rory had assigned her and perhaps getting some alone time with either her laptop or a paperback before settling in for a good hard crash.

There wasn’t much conversation at the table and part of her was grateful for that. She’d already been more social than she had been in months, and though she didn’t think she was coming across as particularly inept in that department, she knew she wasn’t being a chatterbox either. But maybe these guys didn’t mind. She was pretty sure Rory didn’t anyway. He struck her as being more of a loner, like herself.

When the meal was finished, Karen offered to help with cleaning up, but the guys would have none of it.

“You’re a guest,” Rory said. “The first one to stay at House of Fallen Trees and I’m going to treat you as such. I’m just sorry I couldn’t have made you a better meal.”

“Well, it’s a bed and breakfast,” she replied. “So, I expect a breakfast with all the fixings in the morning.”

He laughed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Excellent. But, for now, I think I’m going to go up to my room. Probably call it a night. I’m beat.”

Rory nodded. “You remember which one it is?”

“Yep. I’m fairly confident I won’t get lost. If I do, I’ll scream bloody murder until you find me.”

She’d meant it as a joke, but the expression on his face told her instantly that it had been a bad one. “Sorry,” she said. “Fuck, I can be so stupid. Talking without thinking.”

“It’s okay,” he tried to reassure her. “No harm done.”

They said their goodnights awkwardly and she left the kitchen, walked through a good-sized empty dining room with a slate floor, and back into the living room where the massive staircase was located.

The house had three floors, not including the basement (and, she assumed, an attic), which she hadn’t seen but Saul had told her was an oddity in itself, because it was packed floor to ceiling with old junk no one wanted to go through. Consequently, they went down there as infrequently as possible. Saul had only been down there to check the status of the foundation from the inside.

“What I could check anyway. Then I got the hell out of there,” he’d told her earlier. “Place gave me the creeps.” Naturally, this had only made Karen curious about the basement and she intended to explore it the following day.

The room she’d been given was up on the second floor and she climbed the stairs wearily, gripping the banister with one hand while keeping her eyes on her feet. It was dark on the stairs and she didn’t feel like taking a tumble back down them.

When she reached the second floor, she paused at the head of the staircase, listening to the wind. It sounded so much louder up here, presumably because she was almost level with the treetops at this height. Why had the Captain, Frank Storm — she chuckled again at the obviously made up name — built what was evidently his dream house in the middle of a forest? Why not on some bluff overlooking the ocean? Puzzling, to say the least.

But Karen enjoyed a good puzzle; it was how she looked at her novels. They were all puzzles to be solved. Each one, a mystery when she began it, with no idea of how she would get to the end. She always managed it though, always figured out the puzzle, whether it was plot or character motivation or whatever. It always came to her eventually and she knew it would come to her here as well. Even if the absolute truth didn’t reveal itself, she would be able to fill in the blank spaces with her mind and be satisfied. It was how she lived her professional life and she knew she was pretty good at it.

She listened to the wind a moment longer before moving off towards her bedroom down the hall. Every so often along the wall, there was a porthole built into it, which was peculiar to say the least. Small round windows with which a person could peek into the majority of the rooms, though there weren’t nearly as many placed on the outer walls.

Strange indeed.

When she reached her room, she stepped inside and closed the door, casting herself into complete darkness. Reaching for the light switch, she was surprised to find there was none. “Dammit,” she whispered, carefully crossing the room to where she remembered the night table to be, hands stretched out before her, blind feelers she hoped would save her shins from any collisions. She found the bed before the night table but from there the rest was easy. Sitting on the edge of it, she explored the table until her fingers found and twisted the light switch on a small brass lamp with a frosted glass shade that did little to illuminate the room.

Despite the dimness, she could see enough of the room to be impressed for the second time. The bed she sat on was an antique canopy, as were the other furnishings, including a beautifully and intricately carved redwood hope chest which was snug up against the wall opposite the foot of the bed.

Who had this room belonged to when the Captain had lived here? Not him — his room was on the third floor and far more spacious and masculine than this one. Though Karen didn’t find this room to be particularly feminine either. The wallpaper was decorated with a woodsy motif — no big surprise there — and the heavy drapes were a midnight blue that matched a floor runner leading from the far side of the bed to the threshold of the bathroom.

Bath.

Now there was a welcoming word if she’d ever heard one. Rory had told her on the drive up that, though they had hot water, in actuality it didn’t run much more than warm.

She decided she didn’t care. Even a little warmth would be better than none at all. She’d take a bath, brush her teeth and hair and then return to the bed, power up the laptop and see if she couldn’t start writing what she hoped would be a long detailed journal of her experiences here in Fallen Trees. With any luck, being able to look at and study words on a screen, she might uncover clues about Sean’s disappearance. Maybe see something that no one else had yet seen.

She stood up, walked into the bathroom, and turned on the tub’s faucet. Leaning over with her hand under the flow of water, it seemed as though she’d had to wait a very long time before the water began to warm up. But it did warm up and she plugged the tub and began to undress, gazing at herself in the clouded mirror over the sink. Beneath her eyes, gray pouches were evident and her mouth looked drawn down, as though being pulled by invisible strings.

Karen frowned at her mirror image. Yes, she was tired, but shit. She didn’t feel nearly as bad as she looked.

She reached around her back to unhook her bra, letting it drop to the floor just as the sound of male laughter caused her to yelp and whirl around, instinctively covering her breasts with folded arms.

Goosebumps popped up all over her flesh as she poked her head out the bathroom door, expecting to see Rory or, more likely, Saul, sitting on the bed, having a good chuckle over one thing or another. But there was no one.

Her eyes went to the door — still closed — and the travel bags she’d placed in the center of the bed when Rory had first shown her the room upon their arrival. Nothing appeared to be disturbed.

She shivered, colder than ever, listened in the bathroom doorway to see if the sound of laughter would be repeated. When it wasn’t, she chalked it up to a tired and overactive imagination coupled with the loudness of the water running in the bathtub and the trees thrashing against each other outside.

This time, she closed the bathroom and, though she thought she was being ridiculously silly, used the eye-hook lock to prevent anyone from barging in on her.

Like who? She asked herself, only partly amused. One of the two gay guys downstairs?

She turned off the faucet and stepped carefully into the warm water, sitting down, immediately immersed in what had to be the coziest spot in the entire house right now.

Sinking down low until only her face from the nose up remained above the water level, Karen sighed, causing bubbles to boil up around her head.

The warm water instantly soothed her aching muscles, letting her know just how much of a workout she’d gotten on the trek up here.

If only I could have some hot water, she thought. Scalding. Now that would be heaven. It seemed like mere minutes had passed and already the water was growing tepid. Soon it would be cold and unless she wanted to keep refilling the tub, she should move on from the soaking stage to the scrubbing one.

Reaching for the new bar of soap Rory had provided for her, her hand stopped in mid-air as a dog began to bark ferociously. Outside. Dusty, of course. She doubted there were any other dogs freely roaming the woods, but why did the dog sound so hysterical?

Maybe ran into a raccoon or a deer. Nothing the dog hadn’t run into before, in all probability.

Still, the barking made Karen uneasy and she quickly finished her bath, dried herself with a starched white towel and hurried into the bedroom to put on her night clothes.

By the time she finished dressing the barking had faded into the night until it was completely gone, with only the sounds of the wind remaining.

That poor pooch, Karen thought, scrubbing at her damp head with the towel. She couldn’t blame Saul for despising the townie who had allowed his children to abuse and neglect the animal. Though she didn’t have any pets herself, it wasn’t because she disliked animals. Just the opposite, in fact. She was too afraid of the emotional attachment that came with them. Knowing she would come to love an animal like family — hell, probably more than family, given her hostile upbringing — just to watch it grow old and die. She didn’t see the point in putting herself through that kind of inevitable heartbreak.

Once her hair was dry enough, she hung the towel on the doorknob and crawled beneath the covers of the bed, reaching for her computer bag as she did.

She made herself comfortable, propping two plump pillows against the headboard, and powered up the computer. While she waited for it to boot up, she listened once more to the wind, which seemed to be dying down at last. Thank God. The last thing she needed was a two ton pine to come crashing down on her head.

When the computer was ready, she opened a new Word document and titled it HOUSE OF FALLEN TREES, for lack of anything better. She thought for a moment and then began at the beginning, with the phone call from Rory. She knew this wasn’t the actual beginning of the story. The actual beginning started with Sean’s disappearance six months ago, but she didn’t think she could handle writing all that out just now. She would come back to it later.

As she typed, she fell into the familiar trance most professional writers find themselves in once they tumble into the white of the screen or paper, vanishing from the present world into one made up entirely in their own minds and escaping through their fingertips. In a sense, it was almost the same as automatic writing in that the writers become unaware of their physical bodies and the world around them. She had gone as many as ten hours straight, lost in space and time, unaware she’d grown tired, hungry, thirsty or even that her bladder needed to be emptied.

To the non-writer it probably sounded like some form of self-torture, but to writers, it was sheer bliss and a state they wished for every single time they sat down to do their jobs.

She entered that state now, bringing herself back to her condo the evening before Rory had called. The night she’d woken to the sound of the phone, heard a bizarre message, her door open to the night.

Her surroundings faded before her. She no longer sat in a canopy bed in an ancient and strange house in the middle of nowhere in Washington. There was only the white screen, the black words racing to fill it up, the gentle tapping of the keyboard.

All else was lost.