Chapter 7
Lacing up her sneakers felt harder than it should be, not physically but mentally. Abigail knew that her lack of sleep was starting to be a real problem, but how was she supposed to sleep soundly knowing there was a gun locked up downstairs?
She’d been mulling over the idea of turning it into the police station just to get rid of it… She couldn’t recall if there was or wasn’t some kind of amnesty for found weapons. She also didn’t like the idea of searching for the answer online and having those search results come up in court or an interrogation. Not that she was being paranoid or jumpy, of course.
Abigail jumped when the sound of Bee’s horn sounded outside. She glared at her reflection. Fine, she thought, maybe I am a little jumpy. Her phone bleeped incessantly and she looked at it confused.
From Bee: I’m here
From Bee: sorry if beeping was the wrong thing to do
From Bee: come on, your neighbor lady is harassing me
“What?” Abigail exclaimed, confused.
She grabbed her sling bag and threw it over her shoulder as she exited the house, turning and checking that she had locked the door several times before being satisfied she hadn’t accidentally unlocked it in her vigorous checking.
The fleeting thought that she should mention that to Dr. Lavender was shooed away by the sight of someone leaning into the driver side window of what Bee called her ‘run around hatchback’ but was actually an old Volkswagen Beetle in immaculate condition.
“Hi, everything okay?” Abigail asked, her client-soothing voice fully engaged.
“No, this suspicious looking stranger was watching your house,” Cleo said as she stood up and extracted herself from the car window.
“This is the troublesome neighbor lady?” Abigail asked, rolling her eyes at Bee who cackled.
“Neighbor lady!?” Cleo exclaimed.
That only made Bee cackle more, “she was causing trouble!”
Abigail made her way to the passenger side door and climbed in.
“So neither of you are going to tell me where you’re going?” Cleo pouted dramatically.
The awkward glance between Bee and Abigail did not help and Abigail winced as she saw Cleo catch it.
“Seriously,” she said, all humor gone from her voice now, “where are you going?”
“Cleo...” Abigail said, “don’t freak out, okay?”
“Guaranteed way to make me freak out, but sure.”
Cleo glared at them both as Abigail cleared her throat and continued, “We’re going to the old warehouses down at Half Ave. There was a big bust there in the nineties and there is a bit of... Discourse around whether they really could have gotten out the way they claimed...”
“...There’s a conspiracy theory you mean,” Cleo said, the glare turning derisive.
“Yeah,” Bee said, “pretty much. Look, it’s just a bit of fun. It’s not dangerous or anything!”
Cleo made a snorting noise but ultimately didn’t try and stop them. As they drove off, Bee made a comment about inviting her but Abigail cut her off.
“Nope!” she said, “I love Cleo dearly but she would either be jumping at shadows the whole time or jumping out of the shadows trying to make us scream.”
“Really?” Bee asked, “I would not have picked her for the practical joker?”
The rest of the drive was filled by Abigail’s anecdotes of Cleo hiding behind doors and rapping on tables when they had found an old Ouija board at a thrift shop in junior year. Bee was laughing so hard her eyes were streaming by the time they reached the warehouses.
“Oh my god, but she’s so... Responsible,” she said as she got out of the car.
“She is now,” Abigail said, “but when I say I was surprised when I found out she became a nurse? Very much not kidding.”
The pair stood in an empty parking lot, the gravel worn to dust and the concrete retaining walls were mottled with lichen and wear.
“Creepy huh,” Bee said, “there are a lot of posts claiming that damage is bullet holes, but it’s not. You can see where there used to be cable mounts in some of them. There were lights across from wall to wall before they shut down.”
“Huh, right...” Abigail said, “I can see why they’d think that though...”
She gestured at the line of holes, each one surrounded by a crater in the concrete. Bee looked around and when she spotted a pile of rusting metal, she pointed at it and gestured for Abigail to follow her.
“See?” she said, pointing at the end of one thick wire cable that was attached to a hook. The concrete had popped out in a perfect hemisphere along with the hook anchor.
“Wow, that feels like it shouldn’t have done that...”
Bee laughed. “Probably not, but there’s always got to be a limit to how much weight an anchor point can hold—it could be shoddy work or that someone tried to use the cable to support something heavy... Like, I dunno, as a pivot point for lifting their car up to change a tire or something dumb.”
She shot the woman a look, “that’s a very specific example...”
Her cheeks were lightly pink as she replied, “I may have done something similar in a garage when I was a teenager... I hung a bunch of panels off a wire strung between the garage walls to paint them; the walls were not really walls. It was more of a shed than a garage, and the rivets popped out.”
Abigail snorted, “of course, like I said, way too specific of an example.”
As they fell quiet and looked around, Abigail realized just how unsettled she was. The place was creepy. A bunch of people had died in the drug bust that had happened there and it felt suddenly obvious to her that the conspiracy theorists were clutching at straws. The claim was that the drug smugglers had panicked when they saw the police and immediately fired on them before scaling the walls to escape. As she looked up at the sheer concrete retaining wall that was at least fifteen feet high, the absurdity of it made Abigail shake her head. There was no way they could have used the wall as an escape unless there was something to climb on or they were all parkour fanatics...
“You want to go to the next one?”
Abigail nodded and turned to get back in the car. The next spot was actually the same warehouse, but you could only access the front from a completely separate parking lot that they had to drive to.
“You okay?” Bee asked.
Abigail shrugged, “I know it’s only theory at this point... But I can’t deny that it looks very likely that my dad was involved in something weird. It’s just... It doesn’t add up, like, how quiet and reserved he was—I can’t imagine him ever thinking that spying on his clients was a good idea, or even a vaguely acceptable one. He was so strongly against dishonesty...”
Bee let out a small sigh and halfheartedly shrugged as she pulled the car around and back onto the road.
“Yeah... I know,” Bee said, “our parents are human and that’s a weird enough realization, but when it’s coupled with the potential of them doing something objectively bad? Super weird. I did not deal well with it.”
Bee laughed, but it was hollow and Abigail turned to look at her as they drove.
“Your dad did something bad?”
They’d reached the end of the road, and Bee was leaning back and forth to try to see around the corner before she pulled out. After waiting too long for a slow-moving RV to pass them, she finally made the turn, and Abigail saw her shift uncomfortably in her seat. They followed behind the RV as it made its own way back into town.
Bee shrugged, “he certainly wasn’t the person I thought he was—oh shoot, that’s Lee. Do you mind if I pull over a sec? It’ll be five minutes, max.”
“Sure, of course...”
The Beetle pulled over into the narrow parking lane in front of a clutch of stores and Bee exited the car, approaching an older-looking man donning a green apron. She watched them for a few seconds before realizing that was probably weird, so instead, she got out of the car and wandered down into one of the stores.
The sign was a cute wooden cut out with a hummingbird hanging from the side, the words Sweet As Nectar in metallic gold paint.
Inside, there was an odd selection of home décor and kitchen gadgets. Several of the shelves bore resin cheeseboards, macrame wall hangings featured every few feet, and on the far wall, there was a group of ten photographs mounted. Abigail made her way to the photographs, but as she passed the open door bearing a “Staff Only” sign, she saw Byron on his knees, glaring into a hole in the wall.
“Byron?” she asked, “You all right down there?”
He turned, startled, but smiled when he saw who it was.
“Oh hey, yeah—just can’t believe what people would sign off on in the past,” he said, waving as he stood and crossed to greet her properly.
“Wiring not up to your vigorous standards?” she asked, a hint of a wink in her voice.
He laughed, but when she replied, he did, actually, wink at her, “Oh, my standards are indeed vigorous, and no—these wires do not. I’m looking at them as a favor to the owner—she keeps getting shocks.”
“Keeps!? As in, continues to get more than one shock from her mains power!?”
“Not big ones, but any shock is big enough that I wish she’d close the store for a few days so I could figure it out properly but she’s a workaholic.”
“I think you’ll find she has bills to pay,” Abigail said.
“Well, sure, but—”
“Are you ready to head off?” Bee’s voice interjected.
Abigail turned to see her hovering at the door; she looked awkward as she stood in the doorway. She saw Byron look from one to the other before clearing his throat.
“Sorry, didn’t realize you were hanging out,” he said. “I’d better get back to it.”
Before Abigail had a chance to reply properly, Byron had waved and ducked back through the door. She made a decision she would ask him about Bee the next chance she got, this was getting ridiculous.