Home for a Spell (6 page)

Gangsta buddies of big, beefy black boyfriends. I didn’t even know what to say, other than, “Wow.” So not cool. It was a little discussed fact that Indiana had ties back to the very earliest days of the KKK. One would have hoped in our modern age that we had grown past such nonsense, but the reality was that some people still clung to their old prejudices about color and creed. Not to mention, the Hollister guy didn’t look remotely “gangsta.” No more than Marcus, Lou, or even Mr. Locke here, whom I suspected was just stuck on the color of his skin. Furthermore, the only “gangstas” to be found here in Stony Mill were pathetic wannabe-bads acting out against society by painting unrecognizable symbols on the backs of privacy fences and selling drugs to other wannabe-bads and breaking into cars and houses and somehow coming to the conclusion that the life of a petty criminal was somehow preferable. In other words, fail, big time, as far as “gangsta” goes. Thank goodness for the rest of us.

But Locke? What. A. Jackass.

Locke headed off to the nearest of the two interior doors, still gazing with annoyance down at his torn sleeve. As the light flipped on, I saw the unmistakable glint of light reflecting from a mirror, and in the corner, a toilet. I guess I had gotten it wrong earlier. To give him some privacy and keep my lunch from coming up, I crutched my way over to the windows and took a moment to try to get my bearings. To the far right of the grassy yard that lay between me and the first apartment building were a pair of small enclosures that hugged the parking lot. The latticework meshed with the plain fencing surround indicated their probable designation as Dumpster disguisers. At a right angle to the enclosers stood the first of five apartment buildings. From the windows here, I could see plainly into the windows of the apartments in most of the buildings. Well, at least the ones where the curtains weren’t drawn. To the left was another building, and between me and it, the pièce de résistance: the pool. An actual, inground model, fitted with both deep and shallow ends and a diving board. Hallelujah and glory be. Rare around these parts. If I weren’t wearing a cast, I’d get down on my hands and knees and kiss the concrete surrounding it.

“That right there is the new health center.”

Locke’s voice came from right behind me. Startled out of my musings, I turned my head to find him leaning close over my shoulder, his face inches from mine. I gasped and clumsily sidestepped away. “Oh my goodness. You scared me.”

Amusement played in the five o’clock shadow that made his cheeks and chin look scruffy and borderline disreputable when combined with the wrinkled shirt he’d changed into and the mangled tie, which was . . . well, it was not likely to see better days once again. “Sorry about that. I thought you’d heard me come out. Shall we go look at the place, then?”

His gaze had dropped to my chest, not long, just enough to ensure that I noticed he’d looked. I lifted my shoulders slightly, just enough to take any interpreted prominent display out of the equation. “Sure.”

As long as he didn’t get too close again, and as long as he didn’t breathe on me. The guy had some serious coffee breath going on.

He held the door for me, stumbling over a box just outside on the step. “Christ! Who put that there?”

I recognized the box Marcus had loaded into the miniscule storage area in Lou’s car just that morning. “Lou. It’s your computer. He must have set it down when he came in to break things up.”

“Oh. Well, all right, then.” In an instant annoyance transformed into excitement in his pudgy features. He even rubbed his hands together. “I can sure use that.” He picked the box up and carried it almost reverently to his desk, placing it in the position of honor, smack in the center, actually running his palms over the box like a lover. Someone needed to get out more. It took him a few moments, but he finally seemed to come back to his senses. He licked his lips, looked over at me, and laughed self-consciously. “It’s the little things in life.”

Yeah, like a souped-up, tricked-out, uber-pumped piece of electronic wizardry.

Lou had maneuvered the Hollister dude down the sidewalk toward the cross street. I could see them there, speaking earnestly together, and, thankfully, not coming to blows or scuffling in any way. As for Locke, he lead me off in the opposite direction toward the health center. Very nice. Sunny, airy, plenty of fans, and air-conditioning. Oh, and the equipment looked decent, too. I also drooled over the pool area as we walked past. So calm, so peaceful, so blissfully blue. In my mind I was already coming up with elaborately creative ways to use the pool while still preserving the relative water-free state of my cast.

“The apartment I’m going to show you is in Building One,” he told me as he lead the way up the brand-spanking-new sidewalk toward the apartments themselves, and I forced myself to leave the pool behind, both literally and figuratively, and pay attention. “It’s the only ground-level apartment I have open and available for rental right now.”

The architecture of the building made for a walkway around the exterior center stairwell, so we cut through it to get to the front of the building. “The apartment upstairs was just recently taken by a teacher at the high school,” he was telling me. “Young. Nice. Pretty. Just getting started in her career, I should think.”

Curious, I peered at him. “Not . . . the Angela person that that man was talking about?” I could just see myself walking into a situation that would put me in contact with disgruntled neighbors.

“Angela Miller? No, she’s in another of the buildings. We have a couple of young teachers here. And nurses. We’re very popular with newly established ladies in both of those fields. Nice, clean apartments that are safe and well-maintained and affordable are hard to come by, and . . . well, word gets around.” He was in manager mode again, using the detail as a selling point. I had to say, I much preferred it to anything more personal. And, technically speaking, he was right. Good apartments were few and far between, especially in a small-town environment.

The walkway area was clean, the external siding intact and probably not asbestos. The exposed stairs looked sturdily built and well maintained. All good.

He put the key in the dead-bolt lock and paused before turning it, his hand on the knob. He cleared his throat. “I do have to admit, for the sake of disclosure, that the apartment was tenanted for a couple of months this summer. Meaning, you are not the first tenant to have this apartment after renovations. Not that that is important in any way. The apartment has been completely cleaned and repainted, again, naturally.”

The news surprised me. “I thought the apartments had been involved in renovations since the new owners bought the property,” I commented.

“Yes, that’s true.”

“The tenants must have moved out very quickly.”

He turned his back on me and turned the key in the knob. “I’m afraid I was forced to remove them.”

“Remove them?”

“Yes. They violated the lease. I had no choice but to evict them. I’m afraid I can’t discuss it, though. Privacy laws.”

Why did I feel so certain there was more of a story behind that action? “I see.”

He cleared his throat again and pushed the door open. Back in manager mode, he said, “Here’s what you really want to see. Feast your eyes on the apartment itself. I think you’re going to like it.”

The blinds were all drawn, making it difficult to see much. But as he reached to flick on the lights, a sound came from somewhere deeper in the apartment itself, and it definitely didn’t sound like your average noise caused by settling. Locke froze. I froze.

In the next moment Locke lurched into action like some landlocked sea beast, clumsily searching from room to room.
Probably just a squirrel
, I thought, oddly at ease with the notion that a squirrel could be in residence in the same apartment I was considering renting. I opened my mouth to voice my thought to Locke, but as he lunged to look beneath the sofa, he paused and cut off my first syllable with a gesture that was both a warning to keep silent and an instruction for me to stay where I was. Properly chastised, I decided to continue letting him make a fool of himself as much as he wanted to and zipped my lips as requested. Instead, I remained hovering in the doorway, propping the door open with my back as I waited.

The apartment wasn’t bad, from what I could see of it. Not bad at all. Granted, the dim lighting prevented me from making out any great detail, but it seemed to be pretty nice. Nicer even than I had hoped. One open-concept and large living-slash-dining room, carpeted with what looked like Berber, with a galley kitchen and island-slash-bar lining the wall in the northeast quadrant from where I was facing, and big windows facing out on both ends of the extended space. In the kitchen I saw decent-looking cupboards and a supernice countertop that might be some sort of stone, and there were two barstools facing the island counter. Awesome.

I was considering stepping farther into the confines of the apartment and exploring while Locke did his thing. I mean, it couldn’t
hurt
. Right? Especially since he was now moving down the dark hall toward the back of the apartment. I could hear the shower curtain being pulled aside, the hooks making scraping noises against the rod, and then a door. Linen closet, maybe? Oh, I hoped so. I closed my eyes and tried to feel the room, letting the sounds pull me in. The ability to remotely view an unseen target had certainly intrigued me, but it was not something that seemed to come naturally to me. Maybe starting small like this would help. I took a few deep breaths, in and out, to center myself, focusing on grounding here in this place, then allowing my inner self to drift out, to follow the manager’s path. In, out, in the bathroom. In, out, down the hall.

He let out a muttered oath. I heard him ranting to himself, but it was as though his voice existed on another dimensional plane: faint, faraway, thready. What was he angry about? What was he saying? Did it even matter?

I felt an odd sensation, almost a perceivable shift of sorts, as though I had moved but my body itself had remained in place. Was it working? I tried not to let my excitement knock me out of the sensation, tried to remain centered and not try too hard with my focus. It might have worked, too, if a faint, secretive
click
hadn’t sneaked its way into my conscious mind. It was the secretive sense of it that caught my attention and jarred me out of my meditative state and back into my head. I reeled my energies in and let my eyelids flutter open.

Just in time to see the closet door next to me start to open, no more than a crack of darkness around it.

At first I wasn’t sure that I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. My eyes opened wider, and I blinked to clear them, in case the lingering mists of third-eye vision were still affecting me. The door opened a little bit more, a fraction at a time, stopping at about an inch. I turned my head in that direction, my eyes now in hyperfocus on the thick line of black space between the door and the door frame. My heart started beating faster, tripping over itself. All of a sudden, Hollister’s claims rang in my ears. Sounds. Things moving. I knew, there and then, it wasn’t just settling. And I knew there was something in that closet.

But some
thing
turned out to be some
one
.

Just as I found myself turning my body on crutches in that direction and reaching for the door, I was forced to take a step backward when a small form launched from the closet and rushed headlong past me. One of my crutches went flying when the shape scrambled for forward momentum. The other crutch jammed hard into my underarm as I lost my balance and fell back against the front door.

The figure stopped on a heartbeat as the realization of what had just happened struck her. Because it was a her. The girl turned back toward me in one freeze-framed moment. Wide green eyes, peering out from beneath the low brim of a cap, locked with mine before she turned again and in the next instant was out the door, zipping away in a flash of jeans and a sassy pair of purple Chuck Ts.

By the time Locke responded to the metallic clatter of my crutch crashing against the door frame and came lumbering out from the nether regions of the apartment, the girl was long gone. I was carefully balancing myself to lean down and pick up the wayward crutch.

“What was that?” he demanded, turning his head wildly this way and that. “Oh. Your crutch.”

I nodded. “Uh-huh. That, and a girl in the closet. Nice feature, I guess,” I quipped, “although if your tenants are in fact mostly women, as you’ve said, I would think someone of the male persuasion might be a better selling point.”

“A gi—” His brow rose and fell like the swell and ebb of the ocean, ending in a crescendo of aggravation that caused him to push past me, nearly knocking me off my feet again. Unlike the girl, the manager didn’t stop. He continued lumbering down the interior pass-through toward the parking lot. I heard his pounding feet stop a short distance away and could picture him searching to and fro.

I straightened up again and got my crutches beneath me, moving out of the way of the door so I couldn’t possibly get trampled again. Locke was gone only a short time before he came tramping back through the door with his bearlike, side-to-side shuffling gait, his breath coming in uncomfortable puffs and a gleam of perspiration on his large forehead from his short-lived exertion. I had a fleeting sense of him kicking back in a dark apartment somewhere, playing online video games in loose-fitting athletic pants and a sloppy sweatshirt, and I wondered how close it came. This was not a man you’d find working out at the health center. Most definitely not some type of sports junkie. I didn’t even think he was a couch-bound quarterback.

He ran his hand back through his hair and let his breath come out at once.

“What was that all about?” I asked him.

Locke shook his head. “Teenage hijinks, I expect.”