Brambleman (18 page)

“I think I’d have an idea by now.”

The phone rang. “Could you get that?”
Kathleen asked.

He picked up the kitchen wall phone on the
third ring. “Hello?”

“Sherman.”

“Yeah, that’s me.”

“They did right, putting your story on the
obit-chew-wary page,” said a man in a hard Southern accent. “That
book comes out, you’re dead. What you got to say to that?”

“I’d say it’s time to be rude.” Charlie hung
up.

“Who was that?” Kathleen asked.

“Someone who doesn’t think we should publish
the book.”

“To hell with them!”

“My thoughts exactly.”

* * *

At Thornbriar that afternoon, Charlie read
the article to Beck and Ben. They were impressed but mainly hungry,
so he baked cookies. When Susan got home, she gave him her
I
Don’t Believe It
look and said, “What did you do, pull strings
to get publicity?”

“Yeah, baby,” Charlie said, grinning. “I’ve
got
connections
.”

Later that evening, when he returned to
Bayard Terrace, Kathleen said, “The house is cold even though I
turned on the gas logs and set the thermostat to seventy-eight
degrees.”

“Seems hot to me,” he said. It was cooler in
the dining room, however. He set the laptop on the table. He felt a
draft as he moved closer to the study. He reached down and felt
cold air blowing in from under the study door. When he opened it,
the curtains flew up to greet him and a blast of arctic air hit his
face. He flipped on the light. The window had been shattered.

He stood gawking for a moment before
realizing the room had been ransacked. Two file drawers lay empty
on the floor. The computer was gone. So was the manuscript. “Shit,”
he groaned. His feet seemed to stick to the floor as he walked to
the file cabinet. With each step, the magnitude of what had
happened increased. Someone had broken in and stolen his work in
progress: not only
Flight from Forsyth
and his PC, but
Talton’s notes and the documents he’d bragged about, as well—the
breadcrumbs he needed to find his way home.

“Fuck me,” he declared.

“What’s wrong?” Kathleen stood in the study
door, staring at the fluttering curtains as Charlie dropped to his
knees. “Are you hurt? Oh my goodness.”

Charlie gripped an open file drawer and
hoisted himself to his feet, nearly toppling the cabinet. It
crashed against his shoulder. He angrily knocked it against the
wall like it was a tackling dummy, then tried to compose himself.
“Burglary. Did you take a nap this afternoon?”

She blinked. “Yes.”

“Someone must have come in while you were
asleep. Did you hear anything?”

“I don’t know. If I did, I thought it was
you. You keep the door closed,” she said as she looked around.
“They took the computer, didn’t they? Oh, dear.”

“They took everything. The manuscript. His
notes. Files.” He nodded toward the cabinet to signify the loss,
the full consequences of which were still sinking in.

“They stole the book?” Tears welled in her
eyes. “This is horrible! Who did it?”

She started toward the sofa, which was
covered with shards of glass. Charlie grabbed her arm and steered
her toward the desk. She slumped into the office chair.

“Someone who doesn’t want the book
published.” He drummed his fingers on the desktop.

“We’re ruined.” Kathleen buried her face in
her hands.

“No. I’ve got a manuscript file on my laptop.
And I parked one on an e-mail server. It’s just—”

“You can still do it?” She looked up
hopefully as tears rolled down her cheeks.

“Yeah.” He paused. “Yeah,” he said again, to
convince himself. He knew it wouldn’t be easy. The situation was
terrible, actually. The trump cards—the property records he’d never
bothered to look at, let alone make copies of—were gone. Oops. Big
oops. Irreversible, unrecoverable error. Maybe fatal. Blue screen
of death. He shook his head and shivered. “Check and see if
anything else is missing,” he told her.

She got up, screeching the chair on the
wooden floor, and padded off. As he picked up slivers of glass, he
noticed that the bloody contract was undisturbed. Then, as he
clinked the glass fragments carelessly into the trash can, he
sliced his left middle finger. He retreated to the hall bathroom
and found a Band-aid in the medicine cabinet.

“It’s going to be OK,” he told the defeated
face in the mirror as he held up his bandaged finger. Sure, it
would be difficult to check all the footnotes now, and he’d have to
remark the text. But he understood the story. And the fact that
evildoers wanted to thwart him—that should stoke his determination
even more, right?

No. It was no use. He couldn’t talk himself
out of the despair he was feeling.

Kathleen peered into the bathroom. “I think
they took the salt and pepper shakers,” she declared. “I’m going to
sit down.”

He followed her into the living room and
noticed she was trembling. “They can’t stand for the truth to be
told,” she said. “That’s what brought this on. I think it was the
Klan.”

“Or maybe someone whose granddaddy stole some
land.”

Charlie grabbed the phone book and thumbed
through the pages until he found it: Thurwood Talton on Bayard
Terrace. “You’re easy to find.”

“I never had the listing changed. Just
because … just never did.” She thought for a moment, then said,
“This is a hate crime. We need to call the police. Maybe the FBI.
Even though I never cared much for that J. Edgar Whosis who used to
run it. He was in bed with the Mafia.”

“He was in bed with a lot of men,” Charlie
said. “But as for calling the law … no cops.”

“We should at least call that reporter.”

A plan was hatching in his fevered brain. “Uh
… no. Can’t do that. If Crenshaw found out the records are gone, it
would make
Flight from Forsyth
seem like damaged goods.”

“What should we do, then?”

“Fix the window. Get back to work. And don’t
tell anyone about it.” He pressed a finger to his lips. She looked
at him like he was crazy. He shrugged. “The damage is done. I’m
sure they’ve already destroyed the stuff they took.”

He wished he’d returned the desktop computer
to Thornbriar as soon as he’d bought the laptop. Now he’d have to
buy another PC for Susan and kids.

Kathleen picked up the phone.

“Uh,” Charlie said. “Who are you
calling?”

“Angela, to see if she has a copy of the
manuscript.”

“No. We don’t need it, and she doesn’t need
to know.”

“Phone’s dead,” she said, staring blankly at
the receiver.

Charlie groaned. He grabbed a flashlight from
the pantry and went outside to find that the phone line had been
cut at the box. He looked around the other side of the house and
found two sets of shoe prints in the mud by the study window. One
pair was sunk deep in the mud beside the screen, which had been
taken off and cast aside. Charlie shuddered to think what could
have happened to Kathleen, especially now that she was back to
being powerless.
Would have been nice if she’d woken up and put
a smite on their evildoing asses
.

Working in the dark on a rickety stepladder,
Charlie patched the window with an old sheet of plywood from the
basement. By the time he finished, he could see his breath even as
he wiped sweat off his forehead.

He returned to the study feeling a frenzied
urge to get back to work, but the room was so ugly and cold he
couldn’t stay there. He also felt violated. His space had been
invaded—his work and thoughts had been stolen. Pissed on, crunched
by jackboots. Raped. He walked into the kitchen and slumped at the
table.

When he’d composed himself, he used his
cellphone to report the service outage.

Kathleen sat down across from him and said,
“This is a horrible thing.” A moment passed. “You’re sure we can
keep going?” Another moment slid by. “I need to hear something
positive, Charles.”

He lifted his head to meet her gaze. He felt
like he was a boxer, bloodied, rising off the canvas, not sure what
had hit him, what round it was, or how long the bout was supposed
to last. And all he had now was a puncher’s chance, if he could
keep going. “Yes.”

She gave him a nervous little laugh. “We’ve
got people frightened, don’t we? We’ll get it done just to spite
them. Anyway, I’m too old to be afraid.” She leaned forward and
swatted his leg. “Back to work.”

She retreated to her bedroom. The study was
still cold, so he stayed in the living room, lying on his belly as
he worked on his laptop by the fire. But he was too frazzled to do
anything. The good professor’s words had blurred together in a
meaningless clump on the computer screen. Wanting to do something,
Charlie retyped the title page, adding his name as editor. Then he
replaced Talton’s artless epigraph with a Biblical passage that had
been uttered by a black preacher after his church just north of
Cumming had been burned to the ground: “
I the LORD thy God am a
jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children
unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me
…”

Charlie hoped this was true. He could use
some Old Testament justice on his side.

He gave up on the day and went downstairs. He
looked around the dungeon and, feeling his dark little world
closing in on him, buried his face in his hands. Then he remembered
the rat traps. Soon, the stench of death would be his only
companion. He grabbed a plastic bag and his flashlight and went
into the shadows to search, but found neither vermin nor traps. He
staggered back to the cot and collapsed on it, overcome with a
sudden fear that he had killed not a rat, but Trouble, and thereby
put a curse on himself. That would explain so much.

* * *

Charlie lay on his cot until noon. When he
brought the laptop out of hibernation, he saw the ghastly title of
Talton’s first chapter:
Geologic/Economic Imperatives and
Propensities
. No question:
Flight from Forsyth
sucked,
he was lost, and villains grew fat on stolen breadcrumbs.

“Are you all right?” Kathleen asked him when
he trudged upstairs. “Have you been drinking?”

“No, it’s just hard to get moving today.” He
stood and stared at the wall as he drank cold black coffee.

“Could you call someone to fix the
window?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh. I have a friend that could use your
help. She bought some ceiling fans.”

The idea of doing something other than
working on Talton’s manuscript appealed to Charlie, so he called
the woman, who knew someone else who wanted some painting done.
Before he knew it, he had several days’ work lined up. The idea of
making a living as a handyman appealed to him, and he considered
giving up on Talton’s turd and returning Kathleen’s advance. The
contract was a joke, anyway. A bad one.

After calling a glass installer, Charlie went
to the Y, where the scales said he’d lost ten pounds since
Christmas. At least
something
was going right.

On the way to pick up the kids at Gresham
Elementary, he stopped by Office Depot and ordered business cards
to advertise the services of “Charlie the Handyman.” After Beck and
Ben were settled in at Thornbriar, he loaded his van with
tools.

Late that afternoon, he noticed the answering
machine’s blinking light. He played the message and was shocked to
hear that someone named Joshua Furst, an editor with Fortress
Publishing in New York, had found his home phone number and wanted
to talk to him about his “Forsyth saga.”

Just as Charlie pulled his cellphone out of
his pocket to return the call, the kids exchanged blows. “Stop it!”
Charlie shouted, clicking shut the phone. “Time-outs for
everyone!”

Returning the call would have to wait until
he was safe from sabotage.

When Susan got home she was friendly, even
flirtatious, which made Charlie trust her even less. Then he
realized he’d misread her. She simply wanted to talk about her job,
or more specifically, complain. Just like old times. At least she
wasn’t griping about
him
this time.

During dinner, Susan and the kids demanded
that he return the computer he’d taken back in December—which
wasn’t possible now that it had been stolen. He wasn’t going to
admit that, however. After ten minutes, they wore down his
resistance. “All right, all right. I’ll get you another one,” he
said.

“I want the old one back,” Beck said.

“Uh—”

“You pawned it, didn’t you?” Susan said. “I
knew it!”

“No, I didn’t. Don’t worry. I’ll get you a
better one.”

“When?” Susan said, calling his bluff.

“Now!” He jumped up and stomped toward the
door.

“And you’re paying for it!” Susan shouted
after him.

* * *

Wednesday, Charlie earned $150 installing
three ceiling fans. He called Joshua Furst’s number but got
voicemail, so he left a message. That night, Kathleen told Charlie
it would cost $150 to repair the study window and suggested that
the repair was his responsibility. Since she looked ready to smite
someone, Charlie ducked out and went to the coffeehouse. For the
record, he didn’t care who God or Bad Kathleen thought should pay
for the window, he was keeping his handyman money.

Late that evening, he went through the
motions of working on the manuscript, but he could only look at the
damned thing a few minutes before it repulsed him.

Thursday, Charlie painted bedroom ceilings in
a house three blocks away from Bayard Terrace. As a consequence, he
was late picking up the kids. For the second day in a row, Beck and
Ben were the only children left in their respective classrooms. His
apologies were abject; the teachers’ smiles were strained. Charlie
knew he was pushing it, but what could he say? He had a job.