Wisp of a Thing

11

When Rob returned to the Catamount Corner, he parked next to a dust-covered SUV with Michigan plates. Otherwise, the street was deserted. He double-checked the post office porch, but it, too, was empty.

He heard angry voices as he got out of the car, and it took him a moment to realize they came from above him, through a partially open window. The dim blue light from a laptop computer glowed on the room’s ceiling, which was all he could see from his angle. Shadows moved through this light, as one of the arguing people paced the floor. A female hand reached through the opening and flicked cigarette ash into the night.

Rob smiled wryly. There were at least ten NO SMOKING signs in each room. This must be the couple that had checked in while he was out at the Pair-A-Dice the previous night. They sure didn’t sound like honeymooners, though.

“That’s not what you said before!” a male voice said.

“I know, but that was before we were married!” a woman responded.

“So everything’s magically different now just because we wear these stupid rings?”

“Yes, it’s different because it counts now! Now your stupid little fuckups affect me, too!”

“You said you had all these issues worked out!”

“Well, I was wrong!” The woman paused, then added in a calmer voice, “There, I said it. That should make you happy.”

Rob quietly shut his car door. He carried his guitar onto the porch and settled into the swing. Except for the voices above him, the night was quiet. Only a dozen streetlights were needed to go all the way down Main Street, and three of them had failed, so the darkness seemed like a heavy tent held up by these isolated poles. He felt like a small child hiding under a blanket, safe and deliciously frightened at the same time.

He plucked lightly at the strings of his guitar as occasional phrases drifted down from the argument.

“…flirting like that with every guy who…”

“…not change who I am for you…”

“…don’t respect me at…”

“…trust me as far as you can…”

As he played, the voices above him provided the harsh, chopping rhythm. He echoed their words in his head and tried to fit them to his tune.

“…goddammit, I have every right to…”

“…not my fault that people just like being around me…”

“…work all damn day and come home to…”

“…don’t like to do any of the things I like to…”

Finally he heard a door slam, and then silence.

It was the first time since Anna’s death he’d been moved to write about anything other than her death. He worked on the tune a bit more, barely touching the strings, until the combination of alcohol and headache finally won out. He quietly went to his room, wrote down the lyrics, and slept.

This time, a smell woke him.

A fetid odor filled his room. It reminded him of the old junior high bathrooms that were never really cleaned and thus constantly smelled of urine, feces, and sweat. This odor was similar, although he also caught whiffs of dirt, like a freshly turned garden.

He sat up and winced at the fresh pain around his stitches. Except for the moonlight outside the open window, the room was dark. The blowing curtains made shadows across the floor. He remained very still as his eyes adjusted, and listened for the slightest sound.

Then, despite the silence, he had the very definite sense that someone else was in the room.

Had Tiffany come back to knife him in his sleep? He imagined her on tiptoes, like a cartoon elephant sneaking up on him. But there was no place for anyone her size to hide.

“Hello?” he said, his voice raspy from sleep. There was no response.

He considered turning on the lamp, but decided against it, since it would blind him as well as any intruder. He carefully slid out of bed. He wore only his boxers, and when his bare feet hit the cold wooden floor, it creaked under his weight. As he crept to the door, the night chill raised bumps on his skin.

He stopped. Wait a minute, he thought. Chill? I didn’t open the window. In fact, he was certain he’d closed it before he went to bed, so he wouldn’t be awakened again by the strange cry.

The first real moment of panic struck, and he stood with his back against the locked door for a long time, waiting for anything in the room to move. But nothing did, and by then, the smell had almost vanished.

At last he felt along the wall for the light switch. In the sudden illumination, he saw every detail of the lace-encrusted room, nothing odd or out of place. No furtive figures dashed for cover. He was just about to chide himself for his excessive imagination when he noticed something shiny and wet on the floor.

He knelt beside it. The spot of mud was in the shape of a small, bare human foot. He spotted another one closer to the bed, then saw a whole trail of them, half-dry and rapidly disappearing, that led from his bedside to the floor beneath the open window.

“What the hell?” he said softly to himself.

He leaned out and looked down at the wall below his window. An agile person could climb the gutter drain and then get access to his room. But who would want to?

His fingers slid into something wet. On the windowsill was the muddy outline of a hand. He put his own down next to it; the print was smaller, but the fingers were long and slender, reaching past his own, almost like some kind of monkey. He envisioned a half-simian gargoyle creature perched on the sill, watching him with big, night-vision eyes, like a giant lemur.

And the print seemed to have six fingers.

The smell was almost gone now, as were the prints. Soon they’d be only amorphous patches of dried mud. He couldn’t tell anybody, because there’d be no proof. And what if this was all just some weird hallucination brought on by the whack to his head?

“You’re losing it, Rob,” he told himself. He closed and locked the window, turned off the light, and went back to bed. He was asleep again almost instantly.

The next morning Rob managed a shower, enduring the agony as he washed the blood, Vaseline, spiderwebs, and pine needles from his hair. Luckily, the scab around the stitches held. He opened the window and let the cool air and bright sunshine flood into the room, dispelling the night’s heebie-jeebies. As he expected, the muddy prints on the sill were now indistinct patches of dried dirt that blew away in the morning breeze.

He got dressed and went downstairs to the Catamount Corner’s dining room. A heavyset man with a goatee and glasses, his eyes red from sleeplessness, sat alone at one of the three tables. Rob assumed he was the male voice he’d heard from the porch. He had the general cast of the Tufas—dark hair, dusky skin, and big white teeth—but the qualities weren’t so obvious as they were in the locals. A road map lay open on the table in front of him, and he was comparing it to notes on an iPad. They nodded at each other as Rob got coffee and sat at the table closest to the door.

Rob opened his notebook to the lyrics he’d scrawled the previous night. They seemed awfully trite in the clear light of morning, but they might work as a start. With a little tweaking…

A tall redhead entered the room, glanced at Rob, and smiled. She sat down opposite the goatee guy.

“Sleep well?” the man asked sarcastically.

“Like a baby,” the woman said, deliberately blithe.

“I bet,” he snorted. “Look, if we’re just going to fight all—”

“We’re only going to fight if you start it.”

“Can I finish my sentence?”

“Sure.” She waved her hand dismissively.

“I was saying, if we’re just going to fight all day, maybe I should go do the cemeteries alone. You can do whatever you want.”

“Oh, yeah, lots to do here.”

He rubbed his eyes. “If I don’t go check these last couple of graveyards, then I’ll always wonder about them. It would be stupid to leave without doing it. I’ll do it as fast as I can, and you can, I don’t know, read a book or something.”

“Fine. Next year I pick the vacation. And no more of this idiotic grave-robbing.”

“It’s grave-rubbing. And it’s for our kids, too, if we ever have any.”

“Our kids won’t care who’s buried in what little town. They probably won’t even care where we’re buried. I think it’s a little morbid, anyway.” She stood. “I’m going up to the room. You do what you want.” She gave Rob another smile as she passed his table; she was long and athletic and clearly aware of her effect on men.

When she’d gone, Rob realized her husband was glaring at him. “That’s my wife you’re drooling over.”

Rob shrugged apologetically; he had been staring. “Sorry. Didn’t mean anything by it. She’s just pretty to look at.”

The other man nodded sadly. “Yeah. I’m sorry, we’ve just been fighting nonstop for a week now. It seems like everything I do or say just pisses her off, and—” He stopped. “Well, you’re not interested in our problems, I’m sure. How’d you get the shiner?”

“One of the local Southern belles rang my bell yesterday.” Rob turned to show his stitches.

“Ow. A girl did that?”

“She was bigger than me.”

“I hope so.” The man reached across the empty table between them and offered his hand. “Terry Kizer.”

“Rob Quillen.” Kizer’s grip was soft, his hands a bit pudgy. “Nice to meet you.”

“Likewise.” He looked more closely. “Have we met before?”

“Don’t think so.”

“You sure look familiar.”

“Hey, let me ask you something,” Rob said, glad to change the subject. “Did you see anyone strange around this place last night?”

“Strange how?”

“Somebody sneaking around, being nosy.”

“No. Although my wife said she thought somebody was watching her undress last night, through the window.” His eyes narrowed. “It wasn’t you, was it?”

Rob shook his head, which made him wince. “Never saw her before this morning.” He wondered anew if he’d imagined or dreamed the whole thing. But no, damn it, the dried mud had been there on the floor and windowsill this morning.

“So what brings you to Needsville?” Kizer asked.

“Oh, this and that. You guys honeymooning?”

Kizer looked around, then said softly, “No, we just said that so we’d get the biggest room. We’re actually here to research my genealogy. It was supposed to be a fun trip, tracing my ancestors and all.”

“And it hasn’t been?”

Kizer chuckled ironically. “No, not a bit. But at least nobody’s hit me in the head yet.”

“So how do you go about doing genealogical research?”

“Mostly you prowl libraries and cemeteries. A lot’s on the Internet now, too. But I’ve hit a dead end, and I know I’ve got some family buried around here, so if I can find them and see who else is buried with them, I’ll know where to keep looking.”

“Your wife doesn’t share your enthusiasm?”

He aimed his eyes at the ceiling, toward his room. “You could say that. Plus most of the cemeteries are old and grown over, and you can’t even read the tombstones half the time.”

“I saw one like that yesterday. Out behind the fire station. Seemed to be mostly the Swett family.”

“Hey, that’s one of mine,” Kizer said, a glimmer of excitement in his eyes. “Where’d you say it was?”

“Behind the fire station, just outside of town. If you want, I can show you where.” He had nothing else to do, and Kizer seemed like a nice guy.

“That’d be really cool,” Kizer said appreciatively. “I need to go upstairs and grab my stuff. Meet me out front in about ten minutes?”

“Sure.”

Kizer used the key ring remote to unlock the doors on his SUV. The inside was littered with evidence of a long trip: wrappers, audiobooks, CDs, and odd socks. As they settled into the seats, he asked Rob, “So which way, captain?”

“Huh?” Rob said, looking up at the second-floor windows and pondering the intruder.

“Which direction?”

“Oh. That way. Down Main Street.”

“Are you okay?”

“Oh, yeah, sorry. Just thinking. Did you say that your wife thought someone was watching her last night?”

“Yeah. But she generally thinks that most of the time.”

“I imagine she’s usually right.”

“Yeah.”

Rob nodded at the street. “Head that way, and I’ll show you where to turn.”

As they drove past the post office, Rockhouse was back in his usual place on the porch. The old man waved, and Rob noted the six fingers, just like the much smaller print on his windowsill.

Ten minutes later, a bored Stella Kizer walked down Main Street, hands in the pockets of her jacket, lost in bitter thought. Her marriage, the goal she’d pursued her whole life, was disintegrating around her, and she seemed powerless to stop it. None of the fairy tales she’d loved as a child, none of the sermons preached by her minister, had prepared her for the reality of a partnership defined, it seemed, by all the things each did to annoy the other. Often she’d lie awake, watching Terry sleep and considering how he’d feel if she died… or, alternatively, how she’d feel if he did.

Now she was stuck in the world’s most isolated and backward town—“second oldest in the state,” the frighteningly countrified woman who ran the hotel said with pride—while her husband continued his necrophilic pilgrimage. Ever since he’d discovered his family’s link with the mysterious Tufa, he’d been obsessed with tracing his lineage, as if it might somehow tell him something about himself he didn’t already know.

That made her smile: the idea that Terry, so supremely self-absorbed, might not know something about himself. She almost laughed.

“Life sure is funny, ain’t it?”

She looked up. Rockhouse Hicks smiled at her from the post office porch. The sun was in her eyes, so she couldn’t see him clearly, just a vague impression of an old man in a rocking chair. “Excuse me?”

“Especially when you get married,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “You get up there and say ‘I do,’ but they don’t tell you ‘how to,’ do they?”

Stella shielded her eyes with her hand. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”

“Naw.”

“Then… why are you talking to me?”

“Just being neighborly. Pretty thing like you should be used to that. I bet men been neighborly to you your whole life.”

She walked up onto the porch in order to see him more clearly. He wasn’t the first dirty old man she’d encountered; since puberty, she’d dealt with the unwanted attention of older males. When she rejected or ignored them, they often turned hostile, and she knew how to handle that as well. And today she was particularly in the mood to deal harshly with anything masculine that crossed her path.

“Look, I’d appreciate it if you’d mind your own business. What if I were your granddaughter and some old man started coming on to her? How would you feel?”

“Well, if she was as pretty as you, I’d at least understand it. Men have to be men.”

She scowled. That sounded enough like a threat that it made her a bit nervous. “I’m married, too, you know.”

“Yeah, but you ain’t happy about it.”

She folded her arms. “Now, why would you say that?”

“I seen your husband drive off with somebody else in his truck earlier.”

She blinked a little. They knew no one in this town; Terry had found it on a map and made reservations on the Internet. He hadn’t mentioned anyone accompanying him when he’d rushed through the room, grabbing papers. “Who?” she asked coolly.

“Had dark hair, that’s all I could see. Lots of people around here do.”

Stella was taken aback. Could Terry really be having an affair? Could he have met some local woman on the Internet, come here to tryst with her under the pretense of this genealogy research, and then picked these fights in order to have time alone with this new paramour? Was he that devious, that resourceful?

“I don’t believe you,” she said at last.

“Suit yourself,” Rockhouse said with a shrug. “But a pretty girl like you shouldn’t be alone.”

“I think I can manage.” She turned to walk away, then froze. Standing ten feet behind her was the most handsome—no, the most beautiful—man she’d ever seen. Her stomach dropped, her mouth went dry, and her whole body seemed to surge with sensation. When he smiled, she thought she’d pass out.

“Hey, there, little lady,” he said, and his voice made her whole body shudder. “My name’s Stoney. What’s yours?”