House of Fallen Trees

CHAPTER TWO

Over the next several days, Karen did her best to immerse herself in her latest novel, tentatively titled Downtown Masquerade, a story about a group of street kids and the former nun who essentially saves them.

Writing, she came to learn only after spending several tens of thousands of dollars on a shrink, was really the best therapy she’d ever known. The way she felt about the process was almost religious and she often thought of it as a search for God.

Though not religious herself, she could see the correlations between God, people, and art. God was the great Creator and had made humankind in His image. People were creators and for Karen Lewis the only way to feel close to God was by creating. Writing was a prayer, a meditation, an offering, and a sacrifice. She had to do it every day or her soul would sicken; two days without the balm of words, the search for something holy, and she would barely be able to move about her day. Three days and she was lost to depression and getting out of bed became a chore she would rather not do.

And so she wrote and her characters became her best friends and sometimes her worst enemies, but she loved them all, much, she thought, the way God was reported to love all His children, good or bad.

Deep in the guts of the novel, Karen completely forgot about her strange dream — if it had been a dream — of the bizarre phone call and finding her door open to the night. She sat on her couch, computer perched on her lap while afternoon sunlight snuck in through the slats of the window blinds and fell across her face and hands while she wrote. The digital clock on the bottom right of the taskbar told her it was 3:20 and she had sat unmoving except for her fingers on the keyboard for almost two hours already. She’d meant to get up some time ago to fix herself another mug of coffee, but oddly, she wasn’t suffering from her usual caffeine withdrawal headache.

When she couldn’t have coffee, she would have iced green tea or occasionally a caffeinated energy drink. But it was her aching back causing her to wake from the world of her characters and want to get up and stretch.

She paused in her typing, glanced back over what she’d written, closed the laptop, and put it aside.

The room was growing chilly and she wanted to check the thermostat. The online weather report had said it was supposed to drop nearly ten degrees overnight and she wanted to get ahead of the cold. There was nothing worse than waking up to a chilly house.

She rose, stretched, and rubbed her hands together as she crossed the room to check the temperature. Before she got there, the phone rang. Pausing, she glanced over, the dream of a few nights ago flooding to the forefront of her brain, causing her to shiver with unease.

Snatching up the phone before it could ring again, she said, “Hello?” Her voice sounded harsh in the still, silent condo.

“Karen, it’s your mother.”

“Oh, hey, Mom. What’s up?”

“I was just calling to remind you about Sunday.”

“Sunday?”

“Your father’s birthday, remember? You agreed to meet us at that Mexican place he likes. I knew I would have to call and remind you. I swear, you’d forget your head if it wasn’t attached.”

Karen ignored the dig, trying to figure out what day it was. Wasn’t it only Monday? Why would her mother be calling so early in the week? Surely she knew she’d just have to call her again as the weekend grew closer. Karen was just that way; she loathed social gatherings — especially when family was concerned — and a part of her thought maybe her subconscious made her forget the events on purpose. She scratched her forehead and said, “Aren’t you calling a little early? It’s only Monday.”

“Monday!” her mother snorted. “Karen, it’s Friday.” She sounded vaguely disgusted that her daughter would be so oblivious to the world around her.

“Friday?” Karen started. “It can’t be Friday. I got the phone call on Thursday.”

“What phone call?”

“The…oh, never mind. It’s really Friday?”

“It really is, yes. Are you okay?”

Karen was glancing around the living room as if unsure of where she was. Or for that matter, when she was. “I’m fine, Mom. Thanks for the reminder.”

“No problem. Looking forward to seeing you. It’s been an age!”

“Yeah, it has,” Karen replied absently. “See you then.”

She hung up the phone and went immediately back to the couch, flipping open the laptop once more and moving the cursor over the clock until the day and date appeared.

Friday, November 2^nd.

She frowned. “Huh,” she said. “What do you know about that.” She was still puzzling over her apparent time warp when the phone rang again. What the hell? Her phone never rang this much in a week, never mind a day.

Assuming it would be her mother again, she was tempted to ignore it, but then figured she’d better not. Maybe with any amount of luck her mom would say, “Whoops. I forgot. Your father and I are moving to Tahiti on Sunday. Forget that whole birthday thing.”

Smiling to herself, she answered the phone again. “Hello?”

“Hi…,” A stranger’s voice, male, fairly young. “Can I speak to Karen Lewis?”

No longer amused, Karen said, “Probably not. Who’s this?”

“Uh…my name is Rory Luden.” The voice paused, sounding far away, which brought the strange dream back to Karen. “I was your brother’s partner.”

The words snapped Karen back to the present like a hard slap to the face.

“What?”

“Umm…Sean and I were partners.”

“Partners,” she repeated, as though she were unsure of the word’s definition. “What does that mean exactly?”

Rory didn’t answer the question, but instead said, “I was going through some of his stuff and I found an old shoebox full of papers. I don’t know how much you knew about your brother’s life here in Washington, but we’d just bought an old place out in Fallen Trees that we were planning to renovate into a bed and breakfast.”

Karen’s mind was racing. A bed and breakfast? “My parents went out there…to Washington, I mean. Did you talk to them?”

“No. We never met, but I knew they were here. The police asked me if I wanted to meet them, but given how they felt about Sean’s lifestyle, I figured it was probably best that we keep our distance.”

“His lifestyle,” Karen murmured thoughtfully.

There was an awkward silence for a long moment on the other end of the line. Finally, Rory Luden broke it by saying, “You did know he was gay, didn’t you?”

Is this part of the bizarre dream?

“I…I kind of knew, I guess,” she said at last.

“Well, the reason I’m calling is that in that shoebox I just mentioned, there was a handwritten will. Sean’s. In it he wrote that if anything should happen to him, he wanted his half of the bed and breakfast to go to you. Now, I know you’re probably not going to be interested in it, but I thought it was only fair to let you know about it.”

“My parents never said anything about a bed and breakfast.”

“Sean didn’t want them to know. He said they would try to fuck me over if anything happened to him. You know how laws are in regards to gay couples, I’m sure. Parents swoop in all the time and steal everything out from under the partner left behind, even when they wanted nothing to do with their own child when he was alive.”

Head reeling, Karen had no idea how to respond to this news.

“Okay,” she said, lamely. It was the only thing she could think of.

“Anyway, like I was saying, I know you’re probably not interested, but I wanted to be fair and at least let you know about it. I’m perfectly willing to buy out your half of the B&B. It would actually make my life a lot easier.”

“I own half of a B&B?”

The young man on the other end of the line sighed impatiently, as if this conversation was taking all of his energy and he didn’t have much left for inane questions. “That’s right. But it would probably be best for everyone involved if you didn’t mention any of it to your parents. Sean was pretty adamant that they not know too many details about his life when he was alive and I think we should respect his feelings in death as well.”

“Okay,” she said again. The words “alive” and “death” were echoing in her head like shrill church bells.

“So…if you want I can have the papers drawn up and overnight them to you. How’s Monday sound?”

“I think it sounds…fast. Maybe I should give this some thought before committing to anything.”

“You can’t be serious.” Rory scoffed. “What’s to think about? It’s not like…” He trailed off and Karen could tell he was trying to keep his temper in check. “How much time would you like?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I’m just hearing all this for the first time. Do you think you can give me a few days to register what you’re telling me? I don’t even know what the hell is going on here. This is completely out of the blue.”

“I understand. It took me by surprise too. Frankly, I don’t understand why Sean did it this way. Why he didn’t just will his half to me. But whatever. Like I said, this will, if you can even call it that, is just handwritten on notebook paper. I’m pretty sure it’s not legally binding. But, I’m trying to do the right thing here and respect his wishes.”

“I appreciate that,” Karen’s voice softened, thinking of Sean. “I’d like to respect his wishes too.”

Another pause, then, “So, you want to think about it then?”

“I’d like to, yes. What did you say the name of the town was again?”

“Fallen Trees. It’s a tiny town in northern Washington. Impossible to find on a map, but it’s quaint.”

Karen began digging around in the stuff on the end table, searching for a pen. She finally found one and began to frantically scribble information in margins of an old issue of TV Guide.

“Fallen Trees,” she repeated. “And your name again?”

“Rory Luden,” he replied, not sounding particularly happy.

When she finished writing it down she asked him for a phone number and address where he could be reached and he gave her both, somehow managing to contain his grumbles.

“Okay,” she said. “I guess I’ll give you a call in the next day or two.”

“Sounds good,” he replied.

But before he had a chance to hang up on her, Karen blurted, “How long were you and my brother together?”

She could sense him debating on answering the question, mulling it over, but at last he said, “About five years.”

Karen let out her amazement in a low whistle. “Wow.”

“Yeah,” he repeated. “Wow.”

A good ten seconds passed with neither of them saying anything.

“Well,” Rory said eventually. “Thanks for taking my call. It was…uh…nice talking to you.”

“Yeah. Likewise.”

Rory said goodbye and Karen remained on the line, listening to nothing, feeling dazed and half asleep, wondering what had just transpired. She stood that way for a long time, until the phone began to bleat in her ear and then she hung up, wondering what to do with herself.

After chewing her lip for an unknowable amount of time, she decided it was time for a drink. There was a bottle of red in the refrigerator that had been begging for attention for quite some time and she was going to rectify that situation right now.