Chapter 14 Collins
Collins
I sat on the floor next to my bed, and I stared at the seemingly infinite depths underneath it. I’d been like this awhile—at least a few hours, based on the position of the moon out my window.
I kept waiting for one of the apartment ghosts to push the suitcase out from under the bed like they’d been doing every goddamn day since I got here.
Except for today, apparently.
Today, apparently, they wanted me to do it myself.
“Screw you guys,” I muttered. “The one time I want you to move this stupid bag, and you all leave me hanging.”
I sighed loud enough that I worried I might wake Brady up. It’d been a busy few days at the shop after Leith Wilkes told everyone who would listen about how great Coop’s Upholstery was. I swear the shop was filled with at least half the town’s furniture.
And Brady was great with every person who walked through the door.
My people skills, however, could use a little work.
I’d been a bit of a grump since Sunday. Fighting with Clarke always threw me off kilter, but this was worse than usual.
There was also all the emotional baggage I’d dumped on Brady to consider.
Some people felt better after they let everything out.
I felt embarrassed. I was just grateful we hadn’t had time to talk about it again since.
I couldn’t stop thinking about how Leith’s family had held on to the photo I took for so long. It was so unexpected, but it felt…surprisingly good. Like I had created something that lasted, even when my career, my talent, hadn’t.
And that was how I ended up on the floor of my bedroom. I knew I had some old scans of the rest of the series on my laptop, which I had packed with my photography equipment. I couldn’t look at the photos without opening Pandora’s box under there.
I stared at the darkness until the sky outside my window started to change.
“Fuck it,” I muttered, and reached under the bed, grabbed the suitcase handle, and slid it out from under the bed. The noise it made as it dragged across the floor sounded like nails on a chalkboard—fitting.
I didn’t give myself time to second-guess anything, or else I’d be here for another four hours. Instead, I immediately flipped the suitcase up on its side, entered the combo on the lock (triple sixes, of course), and slid the zippers, letting the suitcase fall flat open.
Here lies Collins Cartwright’s livelihood, I thought as I looked down.
Everything inside was just as I’d left it—as if it were waiting for me, or maybe it was resigned to its fate to rot under the bed for the rest of eternity.
I had the urge to shove it back into the bed chasm, and let the latter run its course.
The stubborn part of me refused to be bested by a case of inanimate objects, so I slid my laptop out of its case and took a deep breath before I opened it.
The screen lit up asking for my password. I swallowed and cracked my knuckles before I typed it in. I felt like I was preparing to enter the ring and go eight rounds with this thing.
Once I tapped the enter key, a loading bar appeared at the bottom of the screen.
I guessed it would take some time for this thing to boot up after I’d abandoned it for so long.
It didn’t matter. I’d waited all night—a few more minutes wouldn’t kill me, and if it did, at least I’d go out facing my fears. That had to count for something, right?
“Collins?” I heard Brady’s voice. “Are you okay?”
I shut my laptop and slid it onto the floor before getting up and poking my head out of my bedroom door. “I’m fine,” I called.
“It’s eight-thirty,” Brady said. Shit. “Are you coming down?”
“Yeah!” I quickly looked around my room for a pair of pants—god, I really should consider cleaning this place at some point.
I spotted a pair of dark blue jeans hanging off the edge of my bed.
I swiped them and jumped into them as quickly as I could.
I was still buttoning them when I got out to the kitchen.
Brady raised an eyebrow at me. “Rough night?” he asked.
“What makes you say that?” I asked, trying to smooth my hair down and straighten the oversized Freddy Krueger T-shirt I was wearing.
Brady looked at me like it was obvious. “I’m fine,” I said.
“Just overslept a little.” Oh, how I wished that were the case instead of the reality that I’d accidentally pulled an all-nighter staring at the bottom of my bed.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said. “I would’ve let you sleep if you didn’t answer.”
“Good friend, pushover boss.” I grabbed a coffee cup from one of the cabinets and filled it with what was left in the pot. I could still feel Brady’s eyes on me.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked. “You seem a little, um, scattered.” That was the nicest way he could’ve put it, I was sure.
“I’m fine,” I lied. “Let’s roll. You’ve got work to do.”
—
My head was bobbing at my desk an hour later.
The coffee I’d downed was doing absolutely nothing to disguise my fatigue.
It couldn’t hurt if I laid my head down on my desk for just a minute.
I looked to the back of the shop where Brady was meticulously pinning a piping border.
In my delirious state, I let out a giggle at all of the half-baked jokes in my head about him laying down pipe.
I lowered my head to my desk and let my eyelids blink closed—just for a minute.
“Collins.” Brady’s voice was near me a second later. How did he get over here so fast?
“Hmmm?”
“Are you sick or something?” he asked. He sounded worried.
“No,” I said groggily. “Why?”
“You slept the last half of the day away.” Brady crouched down, so we were almost at eye level. “Are you okay?”
“I—have I really been asleep that long?” I asked, and Brady nodded. I noticed that the light coming in from the windows was more orange than it would be in the middle of the day. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“I figured if you fell asleep at your desk, you probably needed the rest.”
“Fuck, I’m sorry.” I shook my head and slapped at my cheeks a little. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep. I don’t know what happened.”
“I’m worried about you,” Brady said. “Seriously. Why don’t you go upstairs and lie down?”
“I’m good, I promise.” I held out a pinky to Brady. “No more sleeping on the job, I swear.”
Brady’s brow was furrowed. He wasn’t convinced. “Well, you’re technically off the job, so you’re free to be asleep in your bed now.”
“I’m good,” I said, feeling more awake than I had a few minutes ago, and I remembered what led me to this state of exhaustion in the first place.
It was stupid that I’d spent all night working up the courage to open my laptop to look at the portraits when I knew where all of the originals were.
“But since it’s still light out…I might, um, go somewhere. ”
“Really? Where to?”
I bit my lip. “It’s another hideaway—a spot that I think could be considered part of our quest.” I fiddled with the rings on my fingers. “If you’re up for it.”
“I’m up for anything.” Brady grinned at me. “Lead the way.”
—
“We probably should’ve done this under the cover of darkness,” I admitted as I tried to pull off the plywood that was nailed to the building’s back entrance. It used to be a house but was most recently inhabited by one of the now-closed bait and fly shops in town.
“Yeah, darkness is usually better for breaking and entering.”
“We’re not breaking and entering,” I said. “No one lives here.”
No one alive, anyway.
“I don’t think that’s the qualification for not breaking and entering,” Brady said. “And if it is, we’re still trespassing—at the very least.” He looked around nervously.
“Good thing we’re not going to get caught, then, huh?” I said, and gave the plywood one last good pull, and it finally separated from the house. “Christ, they’ve really got that on there good since the last time I came in here.”
“Do you do this often?”
“Trespass? Yes. At this particular location? Not for a long time,” I said, laying the plywood up against the house. “C’mon,” I said as I climbed through the hole it left.
I heard Brady sigh before following behind me.
The house was older than Toades, and one of the few buildings on the road behind Sweetwater Peak’s Main Street.
It was one big room, one level, and an attic.
As soon as Brady made it through the door, which was a little small for his tall frame, his eyes zeroed in on the big burgundy stain in the middle of the wood floor. Shit. I was hoping he would miss that.
“Collins, did you bring me to a murder house?”
I looked at him sheepishly. “Not in the way you’re thinking,” I said.
“Oh my god.” Brady shook his head quickly. “Nope, no.”
“Would it make you feel better if I told you that the decapitation was totally accidental—”
“Absolutely not.”
“—and that Larry has no hard feelings and is totally chill and okay with how he went out?”
Brady brought his hands up to either side of his head. His eyes were so wide I thought they might pop out of his skull. “You brought me to a murder house !”
“Again, it’s an accidental murder house.” Brady’s eye twitched. “And we’re not hanging out in the murder area. We’re going to the attic.”
“Yeah, because the attic in a murder house is so much better.”
“Isn’t it, though?”
“No!”
I shrugged. “Well, we’re still going up there.” I grabbed Brady’s hand and pulled him toward the pantry. Inside, there was a skinny staircase adjacent to the structure that led all the way up to where we wanted to be.
“You are bad for my blood pressure, trouble,” Brady grumbled.
“Bill me for your insurance premium,” I said. It seemed like a small price to pay for not only the chance at getting my abilities back but also watching Brady have a little freak-out anytime we went somewhere that was even slightly macabre. “Okay, up you go.”
“Why do I have to go first?” he asked.
“Because there’s definitely going to be spiderwebs on the way up, and those give me the heebie-jeebies.”