Chapter 22
Eddie took the curve too fast and the rear of the Honda slipped, tires chirping, before catching again on the concrete. He slammed the steering wheel with his fist, glanced down at the nude photo of Paige that Nicholas had given him, and slammed the steering wheel again.
Paige was smiling in the photo. Actually smiling. Not a fake or forced smile, but a genuine smile, one that he knew she reserved for intimate playful moments in the bedroom.
Eddie stomped on the gas pedal. The narrow two-lane road, bare of traffic, materialized from nothingness at the edge of his headlights. The night was moonless, black as oil, and only a handful of the brightest stars could occasionally be seen in the sky. Lightning flickered far to the south lighting up a thick blanket of clouds above him.
He’d left the club in a flurry, anxious to confront Paige. And now he was just outside the city, speeding and heading east, towards the house he’d once called home.
The nude photo wasn’t the first such photo of Paige Eddie had ever seen. An old boyfriend had snapped a few Polaroids of her that for some reason she’d kept all these years.
Eddie flipped on his bright lights, but the extra illumination did little to help him see any farther down the hilly road. Deep drainage ditches flanked both sides of the two-lane threatening to consume the inattentive driver. Having driven the road so many times, Eddie no longer sensed the threat in the miniature chasms. He felt his way along the road more than he drove it. Still, he was driving too fast. But he didn’t care. What difference would it make if he careened off the road and into the ditch? His wife was gone. His life was gone.
He had only seen the Polaroids of Paige once. But still he remembered them. They were branded into his memory, impossible to forget.
Paige was lying on her boyfriend’s couch in the photos. She said he took them as she dozed naked in front of the TV. She looked drunk or stoned in them, her eyes glazed over and half closed. The room had been very dark and the brightness of the flash had woken her. By the time she realized what was happening, he’d taken several.
Holding this new photo in his hand, Eddie couldn’t help but ponder whether that was the truth. And that really bothered him.
It made him wonder how much he really knew about his wife and her past. Was Paige really the woman she seemed to be? Was she hiding her true self? Was she trying to be what she thought he wanted?
The photos were so far out of character for the Paige he knew, especially considering her self-consciousness regarding her scars that he didn’t know what to think. None of it felt right.
The Honda bounded down a long hill, gathering speed before ramping up an even longer hill. Topping it, the road fell steeply, turned right, then left, and rose again.
Paige claimed she was ashamed of the photos. But for some reason she’d kept them. It hadn’t bothered him before, but now he wondered why she had.
The beam of his headlamps revealed squiggly lines of black tar used to repair the cracks in the aging concrete as he raced home.
Before seeing the photos, he’d never really thought about his wife having been with any other man--he’d certainly never visualized it--and this new photo Nicholas had given him had forced him to. He imagined Nicholas standing behind a camera snapping away, Paige lying on the bed smiling.
Eddie tightened his grip on the steering wheel. He approached a stop sign, slowed, but then accelerated through the interchange without coming to a complete stop.
Nicholas had slept with her. The photo proved it. Didn’t it? The man had even been smug in torturing him with it. Nicholas was enjoying this. He just knew it. He imagined the man puffed up and pleased with himself as he drove home, probably in some expensive sports car, like a Porsche or Ferrari. The man had made it his purpose to taunt and intimidate him, to hurt and destroy. And he’d done a damn fine job of it.
The two-lane flattened out and the drainage ditches on each side of the pavement were slowly replaced with short dense trees crowding in toward the road to escape the power lines above them. Lightning flickered, closer this time, lit up a deer crossing sign. No headlights appeared in his rearview mirror. None ahead. He was alone. He kept his foot heavy on the accelerator.
The photo confirmed Paige had been lying to him. He could scarcely believe it. Even while looking at the photographic evidence, a small part of him wanted to reject the idea but couldn’t. He’d held out a desperate hope that she wouldn’t do something like that to him. But that hope was smashed with each glance at the photo.
He was crushed, beyond tears, and even so he still desperately wanted to see her. She hadn’t shown at the club. Maybe she’d thought she could face him but couldn’t. He hoped she was at home waiting for him. But he didn’t really believe she would be. Would facing him there be any easier?
Paige had let that man photograph her in their own bed. Their own bed. It mystified him that she would treat their bedroom with such a lack of respect. Hadn’t any of their time together meant anything?
Her betrayal hurt on so many levels it made his chest hurt. His brain hurt. His heart hurt. It even made his feet hurt.
Wind tugged and pushed at the sides of the car. Lightning flicked at the ground like a whip--the first actual ground strike he’d seen. Round bales of hay dotted the darkness of the fields on both sides of the car. He was just a couple of miles from home now. He jammed the photo in the back pocket of his jeans. He couldn’t look at it anymore.
It wasn’t a photo of the Paige he knew.
Eddie crested the last small hill and a large yellow dog, possibly part Labrador, bounded out of the dark field and onto the road. He jerked the steering wheel to the right and slammed on his brakes in an attempt to miss the animal. The rear of the Honda began to slide out and he jerked the steering wheel back to the left. But it was too late. The car slid sideways.
The dog jumped in an effort to avoid the car. The seat belt tightened across Eddie's chest. He didn’t see the dog get hit, but he heard a thump and felt an impact on the driver’s rear quarter panel. Not a hard impact, but an impact nonetheless.
The car died.
“Stupid mutt,” Eddie said, more out of anger with himself than the animal. His hands shook. His heart pounded. He hoped the dog was okay. He’d never hit an animal before.
It had happened so fast. The car could have easily careened off the road and slammed into a tree, killing him or trapping him in the wreckage. The reminder of his own mortality caused him to shiver. He’d been doing at least eighty when he’d seen the dog and hammered on the brakes. Thankfully, it hadn’t started raining. If the pavement had been wet, slick with the first splatterings of rain, he might not have been able to keep the car on the road.
The Honda sat sideways across both lanes of traffic. Eddie pushed the gearshift into park and got out. He left the headlights on so any traffic happening down the road would be able to easily spot his car. He swiveled his head, searching the fields for the animal, but he didn’t see the dog. He listened for whimpering, but heard nothing.
Branches of jagged lightning crossed the sky, illuminating the area like a thousand simultaneous strobe lights.
He hurried to the edge of the road, in the direction the dog had been sprinting, and surveyed the field. Straw-colored cut grass and round bales of hay were all he saw. Considering the dog’s coloring, it might as well have been wearing camouflage in the jungles of Vietnam.
He called for the dog.
“Here boy. Here boy.”
No response. No movement in the field. The only sounds were the wind and the distant rumble of thunder.
Hurt, the dog had probably hobbled off to find a place to hide. It would likely stay there. His chances of finding the animal, on his own and in the dark, weren’t good, but he didn’t care. He ran into the field, overcome with the urge to find and help the animal. He looked down at the ground for any sign of blood or tracks and fou
nd none.
Headlights approached from the east.
He ran to the closest hay bale but saw nothing of the dog. He called for it again then dropped to the ground and looked for any lump in the field that might be the size of a dog.
The headlights rolled to a stop in front of Eddie’s car. Large drops of rain began falling. The driver of the car honked his horn.
Eddie stood, surveyed the field again. The driver honked again.
Reluctantly, he stomped back to his car, climbed behind the wheel, and started it. Then he maneuvered the rear out of the oncoming lane. The waiting car accelerated into the night.
Eddie looked out into the field. No dog. He hated leaving it, hated having failed to find it, considered getting back out of his car to look some more. But he didn’t. He drove away overwhelmed by feelings of utter failure.
Minutes later, he turned onto the drive leading to his house. The farmhouse sat on five acres of flat land surrounded on three sides by large hay fields. A dozen Cottonwoods sparsely populated the land along with a single Weeping Willow. Out here he didn’t need to lock his doors--although he always did--and he didn’t have to worry about being bothered by door-to-door salesmen or noisy neighbors or vandalizing teens. Eddie had always liked the house. He liked the homeyness of the place. He’d never thought he would dread seeing it. Not like he did today.
There were no lights on. Maybe Paige had gone to bed?
With a click of the remote clipped to the car’s sun-visor, he opened the garage door. Her car wasn’t there. She wasn’t home. Another disappointment. He had so many things he wanted to ask her, to say to her. Not that he was completely surprised she wasn’t home. The next conversation wouldn’t exactly be a pleasant one. If he was her, he most likely would have put off any face-to-face chat for a while too.
He got out of the car, walked around it looking for damage, and was surprised to find none. He ran his hand over the rear quarter panel where he was sure the car had made contact with the dog, but there wasn’t a dent in the car’s fender or bumper. Not even a blemish in the paint. No blood on the bumper or fur stuck in the gaps of the car’s body. The tail lamp, turn signal lamp and even the parking lamp were completely undamaged.
He got down on his hands and knees to look at the undercarriage. Found nothing. Stood. He scratched at his head, had a seat on the trunk. Perhaps the dog hadn’t been hurt after all. He hoped so.
A light warm breeze that he almost found comforting whipped into the garage. The light from the garage door opener went out, the internal timer having clicked off enough time for the average person to shuffle inside or turn on an alternate light. Eddie sat in the dark. Listened.
The rain stopped. Toads trilled loudly. A streetlamp mounted atop the electrical pole feeding his home flickered. The pole stood a good hundred feet to the west of his garage and had been malfunctioning for the last couple of months. Sometimes it was on, mostly it was off, and sometimes it sputtered forth light like a neon sign on PCP.
He’d put in a call about it to the electric company, but they rarely came out this far, except to check the meter.
Across from his property, Eddie saw the back porch light was on over at his neighbors, the Jones’s. An affable old couple, Betty was a big fan of college basketball while Earl wore overalls and liked to work in his garden, where he babied his tomato plants and grew them more than ten feet tall.
Sometimes Eddie would see him in his garden, and they would wave at one another. Occasionally, Betty would bring over a basket of sweet corn or okra. The couple had been married for nearly fifty years. Eddie could easily picture them out on a night like this, enjoying the evening under their porch, Earl puffing away on his pipe and Betty listening to a ballgame on the radio. The old couple represented a picture of the married life he’d always wanted. The one he’d clearly failed to attain.
The wind turned cooler, made the hair on his arms stand up. He had that same feeling he sometimes got when he walked out to the barn in the dark. That feeling that someone or something evil was behind him, stalking him, creeping up on him, and was going to rip him limb from limb.
Turning, he scanned the inside of the garage, but saw nothing out of place in the darkness.
He stood up and studied the horizon. Lightning crackled through the distant sky, outlining a huge thunderhead far to the northwest. Though the storm had moved a few miles away, the ground shook lightly with the rumble of thunder.
Shadows jumped across the ground with each flicker of the streetlamp and the wind whipped at the trees, but still Eddie didn’t see anything unusual. Even so, he couldn’t shrug off his feeling of fright. Eyes crawled over him. A supernatural hand of terror clawed at his shoulder. Someone was watching him. Someone like Nicholas.
Eddie briefly considered the possibility he was walking into some kind of trap, that Nicholas wanted him here, although he couldn’t see why. Eddie was tired of Nicholas, tired of the game. If Nicholas had come here expecting to find someone to victimize then he’d made a terrible mistake. Eddie would be no victim. No matter what Nicholas thought, he wasn’t a coward.
A fresh gust of wind, cold wind, sliced through Eddie like an icy knife, and he turned his back on it walking deeper into the garage. At the door leading into the kitchen, Eddie tested the knob. It was locked, as it should be. He tapped the button on the wall closing the garage door. The overhead light popped back on and Eddie turned his head back to watch the door lower to the concrete. It hit the ground with a quiet thump.
Eddie unlocked the door with his key and stepped into the kitchen. He waited quietly in the darkness for a few moments allowing his eyes to adjust. He listened. The only sound he heard was the rattle and hum of the refrigerator fan. He shut the door. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he wasn’t alone. Something felt very wrong.
Crouching down, he crept ape-like past the washer and dryer and a pile of his clothes Paige had stacked that morning. He moved quickly and quietly across the kitchen tile.
As he passed the refrigerator, rounded the corner and wobbled through the short hall leading to their bedroom, he felt a bit like a fool. It was probably nothing. Just a bad case of the jimjams. He was probably alone, acting like a paranoid idiot.
Still, he kept low and he kept the lights out. Paige was always leaving the curtains in the house wide open, and if someone was outside watching, he didn’t want them to know his location in the house. He wouldn’t let them figure out where he was by spotting him through a window or by watching for a light to be turned on. He didn’t need the lights. He’d been up enough times in the middle of the night he could navigate the whole house in the dark.
The hall was carpeted, windowless. Eddie stood up as he moved through it so he could move faster, get into the bedroom quicker. Once inside, he squatted next to the king-size bed and reached underneath it feeling around. It has to be there. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d pulled it out. Still, it had to be there. Where else would it be? He kept it under the bed for quick access. Just in case they ever had a midnight intruder.
His fingers brushed against cold metal. Bingo. He had it.
Pulling out a small black box the size of a shoebox, Eddie shifted his eyes back and forth between the door to the bedroom and the single window in the room, looking and listening for any movement inside or outside the house. There was none.
He felt across the top of the box. Five black buttons and a brass knob protruded from it. Eddie found the first and fifth buttons and pushed them simultaneously, then he found the second and fourth buttons and pushed them, then he pushed the third and final button. Click. He smiled and turned the brass knob ninety degrees to the right. The box popped open.
This was not the first time Eddie had had the feeling someone was watching him--for a while, when they’d first moved into the house, he’d suspected old Earl of being a peeping Tom--but this was the first time he’d opened th
e box because of such a feeling.
He put his hand inside and pulled out the single action Smith and Wesson .45, a gift from his father on his eighteenth birthday, and Sam’s words came back to him, “You know if I was you, I would get that gun.”
Well, now he had it. And damn the fool who stood against him while he carried it.