Chapter 5
Five
Please don’t offer me your positive perspective when I’m trying to be a hater.
—Weaver’s secret thoughts
Weaver
She’d dry heaved for ten minutes before she’d declared that she was finished and she would see me at her parent’s house.
She walked across the street, got into a Ford Excursion, and sat in the driver’s seat for a full ten minutes before she seemed to collect herself enough to leave.
I walked back into the coffee shop and ordered a pastry and a coffee, drank half of it, and never once stopped staring at my phone.
I didn’t know this lady.
I had, of course, heard about her.
Not from Sheriff Black and Gentry, though.
But from the talk of the town.
Apparently, Edith “Eddy” Wheeler was a powerhouse of a soccer coach.
She’d taken the girls of Jesper County Schools to state three times in her five years of coaching them.
She’d taken them last season as well, and they’d won.
They’d held a freakin’ parade in honor of them, and I’d gone, of course.
Our company had put our trucks in the parade, and I’d driven one out of obligation.
But seeing Eddy had been the highlight of my day.
She was captivating.
Not super tall, and very skinny, but she had captivating brown eyes the color of champagne, long, curly brown hair that was down to her ass, and the most beautiful porcelain skin that I’d ever seen.
She reminded me of one of those American Girl Dolls that my sister had loved to play with when we were kids.
I’d thought about her often since I’d seen her in that parade a few months ago.
She’d been walking down the road with a massive smile on her face, hair long and swinging, in running shoes, tights, and an oversized Jesper County Soccer sweatshirt.
Nothing super spectacular or standoutish, but she’d captivated me to the point where I’d wanted to know her.
And now there I was, helping her out of a nightmare.
My phone rang, and I answered it as professionally as I could.
“Hi.” Eddy’s voice was shaky. “I just really messed up, and I was hoping that you were free to come look at my parents’ house. I think I shorted an electrical socket out when I plugged something in, and now I’m worried that it might cause a fire or something.”
She sounded sick to her stomach.
I didn’t blame her.
I cleared my throat. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.” I hesitated. “Tell me the address.”
She gave me the address, her voice only a little bit shaky.
The drive to her parents’ place took me five minutes seeing as I was already in town.
When I arrived, she opened the door with the fakest smile I’d ever seen and urged, “Come on in.”
I went in only after grabbing my tool belt from the back seat.
She stepped to the side, and I said, “Where’d you get the electrical outlet jammed up?”
She was shaking so badly that I brushed my hand past hers in hopes that it would calm her down.
She drew in a deep breath, then let it out through her mouth.
“It’s in the basement,” she said. “Come on down, I’ll show you.”
I followed her down, and she led me directly to the “broken” electrical outlet.
Last night, Gentry and I had spoken at length about how today was going to go, and we both decided that from that point forward, he would know nothing about what happened.
I’d agreed with him and had then called Apollo to follow up with him.
His “how the fuck do y’all keep running into nut jobs? This place was supposed to be low key” had started off our conversation. Then we’d ended with “we need to get some eyes in there.”
Which led me to going to buy a new cell phone that I could leave plugged in to act as a hot spot, and a brand new outlet that would also be our source of eyes and ears if this didn’t end how we wanted it to end today.
“That’s it,” she said.
I nodded and got to work, heading to the electrical panel in the back corner of the basement before shutting off the power to everything besides the lights.
You can learn a lot from what an electrical panel looks like.
Such as, when you have more breakers than are needed to run a room with only four can lights and eight electrical sockets.
If I wasn’t convinced that there was more to the downstairs, seeing that there were four times the number of breakers needed for the space would’ve made me suspicious.
I got to work installing the new camera outlet—something that looked so eerily similar to a real one that it was concerning. When I was done, I “checked” the other outlets, moving a couch out of the way of one to ensure that it was working properly.
While I was down there, I plugged the cell phone into a charger and left it plugged in under the couch. Then moved on to the rest of the room.
I was almost done when my phone rang. “Grant.”
“It’s good,” he said. “And I now have access to their network. I don’t see anything else on the network besides a computer that they know about upstairs. Did you find anything else?”
“No,” I grumbled.
“I think that whatever they have going on is all closed circuit, like I suspected.” He cursed. “Hopefully you can get into that room today.”
But, as if the world had heard Apollo’s words and jinxed us, there was a pounding on the stairs.
“What’s going on here?” a man barked.
I cursed under my breath.
“Oh, Dad,” Eddy said, sounding surprised. “What are you doing home so early?”
“We decided to skip paying for a hotel room for a second night thanks to some teens using the one next to us as a party suite.” He looked suspiciously at me, then Eddy. “What’s going on here?”
His words this time were a whole lot less pissed off. He’d somehow flipped a switch, and now the nice pastor had come out to play.
“I broke off the vacuum plug in the socket.” Eddy pointed at the vacuum, an old, ancient thing. “I think it might’ve given up the ghost. Then it started to smoke, and I freaked out. Cara Humphreys recommended Mr. Grant here. And he came as soon as he could.”
“Got the socket changed over,” I said as I tucked my power tester into my belt.
“Everything else in the rest of the sockets look really good. No smoke was visible when I arrived, but I imagine that’s because the vacuum wasn’t drawing any power.
You don’t want to be plugging something that ancient in again.
The rules and regulations have changed a lot over the years, and they have to pass a whole battery of safety tests before they can be sold.
The same can’t be said for vacuums made in the nineties. ”
“What’s going on?” a hesitant sounding female voice said from the top of the stairs.
“Your vacuum cleaner kicked the bucket, dear,” Barton Wheeler called out to his wife. “I think it’s time to finally admit you need a new one.”
I looked toward the woman who blushed on command. “Oh.”
“I got the prong stuck in the outlet,” Eddy pointed out as she walked toward them with the old outlet in her hand. “Look.”
“Whoops.” Minnie Wheeler covered her mouth with her hand.
“Smoking, you say?”
I gathered the rest of my things and headed toward the group.
Eddy looked clearly uncomfortable, but not in an obvious way. In an awkward, I don’t always get along with my parents kind of way.
“Why were you here to clean up?” Minnie asked when Eddy didn’t speak up fast enough.
“I…”
But before she could say anything more, there was yet again a commotion at the top of the stairs.
This time, Eddy’s twin walked down the stairs and said, “Surprise!”
Eddy’s shoulders drooped.
“Antoinette!” both parents cried.
A solid distraction.
Good.
I caught Eddy’s hand and tugged on it lightly.
She looked over at me with wide eyes.
“Not to interrupt,” I said. “But I have to get going. The cost of the after-hours house call and the new outlet is one fifty.”
“Oh, let me just get—” Eddy started, but her father interrupted yet again.
“I’ll get it. Follow me.”
I did, giving one last look toward Eddy before heading up the stairs behind the sicko.
We went into his office, and he wrote out a check to me before holding out his hands.
The last thing I wanted to do was shake that sick fuck’s hand, but I did it anyway.
“Thanks for coming out on such short notice,” he said. “I would hate for my house to have burned down.”
“Agreed,” I said. “Can’t have the pastor’s house burnin’ down.”
“Do you go to church, son?”
I nodded. “Sure do.”
“Where at?” he asked.
I named the first one that I could think of, which happened to be the sign for the Cowboy Church that was just down the road from my place.
“Ahh,” Barton said. “That makes sense. You strike me as a loner.”
I chuckled. “That I am, sir. Have a good day.”
May you rot in hell for what you’ve done.
He showed me to the door, and I had the crazy urge to head back down the stairs and rampage through their house so I could expose all of the man’s secrets.
But, since I wasn’t willing to make it any worse for the two sisters downstairs, I left.
I had a call to Gentry to my ear almost immediately after the door shut behind me.