5. Every time I close my eyes, it’s like a dark paradise
5
Every time I close my eyes, it’s like a dark paradise
Moth
I tried to sleep that night, really, I did. With so many memories floating around and so many thoughts in my head, it was impossible. By the time the first rays of sun began peaking in the window, I gave up and threw the comforter back, hurrying down to the kitchen to brew some coffee.
Today was the day the inspector was coming over, and I was going to need the caffeine.
Waiting for it to finish, I sat down at the kitchen table, in my dad’s old favorite chair. I needed to shower before the inspector got here. I needed to work on the attic and my dad’s bedroom. The hallway and the shed were empty, and I had stripped the kitchen down to bare bones—just what I needed for as long as I stayed here. I had a small pile in the hall closet of things I planned on keeping, but other than that, I was making good progress.
The phone on the wall beside the stove screamed to life, and I yelped, jumping so hard I nearly fell off the chair. Strange, I didn’t even know my dad had kept that old thing hooked up .
Stepping across the room, I picked it up off the cradle and brought it to my ear.
“Hello?”
There was static on the other line, but not much else. It was quiet, and unnervingly so.
“Harper residence. How can I help you?”
Again, there was nothing there. Just when I moved to pull the phone away from my ear, I heard a shuffling on the other end, and then a low growling laugh before the line went dead. A shiver raced up my spine, and I slammed the receiver down, stepping away from the phone as if it were a deadly spider hanging on the wall.
It was nothing. It had to be nothing.
Coincidence, and all that?
Except I didn’t really believe in coincidences.
I stepped out of the shower, pulling a towel through my hair. I felt the weight of my world fall away with the grime, and I took a deep, relaxing breath. It was true what my mom always used to say.
Feeling down? Take a shower. You’ll feel better.
She was right.
Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about the phone call. It had to be related to the letters, didn’t it? Things like that didn’t just happen.
Sighing, I quickly got dressed—a simple black tank top and black biking shorts—and hung the towel over the shower curtain rod, as Dad had always taught me. It was weird how old habits came right back when I stepped into this house. In a lot of ways, it was like I never left. Still, I couldn’t wait until it was over.
I needed out of this house, and out of this town. Too many memories.
Just as I opened the medicine cabinet to search for a comb, I heard a knock on the door.
Fuck.
I grabbed the first brush I could find—my mom’s old sea shell brush.
She’d always said it made her feel like Ariel.
Hurrying down the stairs, I dragged it through my hair as I came to the front door and pulled it open.
Ray Boone stood on the front porch step, looking up at me with a soft smile. He had changed more than anyone else in this town. He was shorter than me, with deep black hair, touched in grey at the temples. He wore a ball cap pulled low over his eyes, and his face was touched with sun spots and burnt across the bridge of his nose. When he reached up to shake my hand, his hand and forearm were covered in scars, callouses, and bruises. The other clutched a clipboard, and I suspected it was the same one Tammy had had the day before.
He had been a heartbreaker upon a time, but now, years of working outside in the heat had taken its toll.
“Hey there,” he said with a firm handshake. “Tammy said you’d be needin’ an inspection.”
“Yes, sir!” I said, stepping back and inviting him in. “She was here yesterday to help me sell, but she said it’d be best to get the old place in better shape before I put it on the market. ”
When he turned back to look at me, he nodded.
“Uh, yup, that’d be your best bet,” he said. He looked around much the same way Tammy had. “In a town like this, with a house this old?”
He snorted a laugh.
“This house is older than I am.”
I laughed, but it was joyless at best. It was true, after all.
This house was old when my parents bought it right after they got married, when my dad graduated from the academy. It was old when I was born, and that was twenty-eight years ago. At this point, old was an understatement.
Much like before, we walked around the house, though Ray seemed a little more lenient than Tammy.
“Ceilings fine,” he grunted, clicking his pen and crossing something off. “That’s peeling, nothing a scraper and some new paint can’t fix.”
When we finished with the inside, we walked around the outside. When we made it to the back door, he knelt on the concrete slab beneath it and pulled out a pocketknife.
Something in my chest jumped to life, and I had to remind myself to calm down.
Ray was seventy-eight. What was he going to do to me?
Knife or not, he wasn’t capable of much.
What did I say? Jumpy.
He pushed the blade of the knife into the bottom of the wooden frame, and with a sickening crunch, it sunk up to the hilt.
He grunted, and this one sounded a little more serious than before .
“What does that mean?” I asked tenderly.
“Well, it’s to be expected, a house this old,” he said, cracking and popping as he got to his feet. “Some of the woodwork is gonna need replacing.”
I sighed. I had been afraid of that.
“How many thousands is that gonna cost?” I asked.
“Not thousands,” he said, turning to me as he scribbled on the clipboard. “Couple hundred. Just need a new two-by-four and an afternoon or two, depending on how many are like that.”
That, at least, gave me hope.
“So overall, not a lost cause,” he said, flashing me a smile. “Happy to hear it. It’s a beautiful place. Are you sure you wanna sell?”
I sighed happily, looking around. I looked out over the pasture, through the fields that Gunner used to gallop through, his black mane waving like a flag behind him.
I missed that horse so much I couldn’t even explain it.
Maybe I could get another one?
I shook my head.
No. No way. I couldn’t stay here, especially not after the phone call and the notes.
“Yeah,” I said finally, turning back to Ray. “I should. I have a job and a place in Kansas City.”
He chuckled, and slowly we made our way back around to the front of the house.
“Well, ya know, the old vet? Dr. Addams? He passed last year. So if you wanna see a vet around these parts, you gotta drive a little while. The whole town would be happy for someone to take his place. ”
I sighed.
“Yeah, I know,” I said with a shrug. “I’ll think about it.”
Except I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. I had to get out of here. All I could think of were the weird letters with the moths, and the tiny blue brick house on Main Street.
Were they connected? They had to be, right?
“Miss Nessa?”
Ray’s voice caught my ears, and I jumped again, looking up at him.
He’d been talking to me, and I didn’t even notice.
“Y-yeah, sorry. I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“I understand,” he said, reaching out with his free hand and giving my shoulder a gentle squeeze. “I was the same way when I lost my dad. It’s never easy.”
He was right, but for some reason, I couldn’t help but think that losing Dad wasn’t the reason for my sleepless nights.
After a few more minutes of small talk, Ray took his leave, leaving me alone on the front porch, looking out over the yard. I remembered playing in this yard, kicking a ball with my childhood dog, a retired K-9 officer who had never quite taken to the job. He’d never really had it in him to bite anyone, even if it was a bad guy.
I missed him, too. I missed so many things about my life before I left for college.
Caught up in my thoughts, I didn’t hear Barrett approach until I heard the truck door slam, and the sound of his cowboy boots over the gravel. How had I missed an entire pickup truck driving down my driveway?
I missed a lot of things, apparently .
“Hey Nessa,” he said, coming over to plop down beside me on the front porch. I resumed my looking out over the yard, and he did the same.
We sat in silence for a few minutes, until Barrett broke it.
“Figured you’d be needin’ some more help,” he said, looking over at me. His Stetson threw his green eyes into shadow, but his lips turned up in a smile. “What’d Ray say?”
“Well, not a lot,” I said with a laugh. “But that’s Ray.”
“Right,” Barrett chuckled.
“But he said it wasn’t as bad as Tammy described.”
“Not surprised,” he snorted. “She’s always been a drama queen.”
After sitting for a few more minutes, we stood from the porch and made our way inside. I beelined for the kitchen, giving the old phone a sideways glare as I made my way to the coffeepot. The lack of sleep was starting to get to me. I could feel the fog rolling into the corners of my brain, and I fought a yawn as I reached into the dish drainer and grabbed a couple of cups.
“You alright?” Barrett asked, and I nodded.
Leave it at that. He didn’t need to know what was going on. He would freak out and overreact.
Or was I under-reacting?
Who knows?
I poured us each a cup of coffee, reaching into the fridge for the French Vanilla coffee creamer my dad kept in the door. I handed Barrett his mug, and he thanked me.
“Any idea where to start?” he asked.
I shrugged.
“The den, I think. Dad’s got a ton in there. ”
“He practically lived in that den. Especially when he was working.”
I snorted. It was true.
We quickly finished our coffee and made our way upstairs. My dad’s den was the last door on the left, right across from his bedroom. Reluctantly, I pushed the door open.
The desk sat in front of the window, facing the door. As a kid, I asked him a couple times why he didn’t face the window. He’d given me the quintessential cop answer; so no one could sneak up on him while he was working.
Along one wall, a floor-to-near-ceiling stack of evidence boxes ran the length of the wall. Along the other wall, there were trophies I’d won in high school, more pictures, a few file cabinets, and the gun safe.
“Boy, you weren’t kidding,” Barrett said with a sigh. “Where do we start?”
“The evidence boxes,” I said, pointing. “I don’t need them. Doubt it’s even legal for me to keep them.”
And so, we got to work. Barrett carried the boxes alone, stating with a puffed-out chest that it was ‘men’s work’, and I should work on the file cabinets. I laughed at him but thanked him for giving my back a break.
Still, my brain was a million miles away. All I could think about was the phone call this morning, the letters, and the shadow on my porch last night. They had to be connected, right? They had to be—
I gasped and pulled my hand out of one of the filing cabinet drawers. Something sharp and not very nice had met my thumb with a painful reminder that I should look before I go sticking my digits into the darkness. Distracted and sleep-deprived wasn’t the right mindset for all this cleaning.
“Son of a bitch,” I grunted, getting to my feet. As I got to my feet, I noticed a gash about an inch wide that I had sliced into the pad of my thumb, just beneath my thumbnail.
“What’s up, buttercup?” Barrett asked, stepping across the room.
He looked down at my thumb and then down at the cabinet drawer. Gently, he reached in and pulled out a broken picture frame.
“Of course,” I grumbled, turning out of the room and making my way into the bathroom. I flipped on the tap and stuck my throbbing thumb under the icy cold water. The pain began to die down almost instantly.
Why the hell would my dad have a broken picture frame stuck in a drawer somewhere? Why the hell would he do something like that?
“Okay, seriously,” Barrett said, stepping up behind me. This time, when I jumped, he sighed. “What’s up with you? You’re distracted.”
“I told you,” I said, looking up and catching his eyes in the reflection in the mirror above me. “I didn’t sleep.”
“And why not?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest. “After all the work we did yesterday, it should have knocked you the fuck out.”
It was my turn to sigh, my brain moving in lazy, disjointed circles. I shouldn’t tell him. I knew I shouldn’t, but either the pain, the desperation, or the sleeplessness wouldn’t let me keep my damn trap shut.
“Promise you won’t freak out?” I said, still watching him in the mirror. I saw in crystal clarity when he rolled his eyes at me.
“I will do no such thing,” he said, shaking his head. “As I have said, I am a bitch, and as such, sometimes I react like a bitch. So I make no promises, and I offer no apologies.”
Once in a while, Barrett’s queerness was front and center. This was one of those times.
I laughed, pulling my thumb out from under the water and inspecting it. It wouldn’t need stitches. Reaching over, I grabbed a few sheets of toilet paper and pushed them against the wound to stem the bleeding.
“Just some really weird stuff has been happening, and I—”
“Ghosts?” Barrett asked, and I couldn’t help but laugh. It was a deep, cackling belly laugh, and when it finally tapered off, I was grateful for him. I needed that.
“No, not ghosts,” I said, digging in my back pocket, where I’d stuffed the most recent note. “Unless you know of a spirit with handwriting like this.”
I held it out to him, and he took it, an unreadable expression on his face
“The fuck is this?” he asked, his narrowed eyes flickering across the words.
When he’d finished—reading it several times over by the looks of it—he looked up at me with a look that seemed almost pained.
“Well, last night when you left, I fell asleep,” I said, trying to think of the best words to say. “And when I woke up, someone was standing on the porch, and then when I went outside to confront them, there was a glass vase, upside down, with a moth inside of it, and that note.”
I motioned to the paper in his hands, and I watched him pale visibly.
“Excuse me?” he said. “What?!”
“Yeah,” I barked a laugh. This wasn’t funny. I shouldn’t be laughing, but I couldn’t help it. “And that’s not the first one, either. Also, this weird phone call this morning. I answered and someone just laughed all creepy and hung up.”
“A stalker ,” he spat, looking down at the letter in his hand as if it were poised to snap at him with venomous fangs. “You come back to town for a week, and you have a stalker, yet I’ve lived here for years now and I had one date last year. One. ”
I laughed again, and a thought clicked into place.
A stalker. I hadn’t thought of that before, but I guessed it was true.
“In all seriousness, Nessie? This is serious. You should come stay with me.”
My laugh went quiet, and I looked at him.
“No, no way,” I shook my head. “It’s not that big a deal.”
“And when will it be, hmm?” he asked, handing the note back to me. I stuffed it into my pocket once again. “Did you read that? ‘I can’t wait to call you mine’? Ness, come on .”
“It’s probably nothing,” I said, pushing past him and making my way back into the den. “I’m sure it’s some local high school kids playing a stupid joke. ”
“Oh yeah, it’s a joke alright,” he said, following me in and leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed over his chest. It had been a long time since I had seen him so damn serious. “Until someone breaks in here and you get brutally raped or murdered… or worse?”
I chuckled. Seems we had the same mindset.
“Worse?” I asked, looking over at him with a wrinkled nose. “What’s worse than murder?”
He seemed to think for a second, a deep wrinkle forming in the middle of his forehead before he shrugged, tossing his hands up.
“I don’t know! That’s not the point, Nessa!”
“Okay, okay fine!” I walked across the room, my hands up in surrender. “I’ve got protection.”
He seemed thoroughly confused before I slapped my hand down on the gun safe with a satisfying smack.
“Do you even know how to get into that?” he asked.
I knelt in front of it and punched in my birthday—02-29-96.
It popped open, and I flashed Barrett a smug smile.
“See?”
“Have you ever even shot a gun?” he asked, looking down at me with a cocked eyebrow.
“How hard can it be? I asked, reaching in and pulling out my dad’s service pistol. “Aim and squeeze.”
It was Barrett’s turn to laugh this time, and again, I jumped.