The Revenant: A Horror in Dodsville Read online

  Mr. Price must have noticed something was up when he entered the living room and saw the three of us sitting there, trying to avoid his stare. “What’s everyone sitting around here for?” he asked. “And where’s dinner?”

  “Shit,” Tabitha replied and jumped up. “I forgot.”

  “No you didn’t,” I said before Tabby had the chance to leave the room. “I’m taking everyone out to dinner. Remember?”

  Tabitha gave me a thank-you look and Julie smiled in my direction. At least I finally managed to do something right.

  “We were just waiting for you to come home and get cleaned up,” Julie added.

  * * *

  Mr. Price threw a fit when Julie told him about the plans for the week. “Have you no respect for your brother?” he argued while eating his meal. He directed his anger at his two daughters, but I knew it was meant for me also.

  “It’s not like that, Dad,” Julie replied. “And I’ll move back home for the week so you won’t have to worry about anyone being there.”

  He remained adamant throughout the main course, but during dessert, and after a few glasses of wine, he began to soften. After that it was only a matter of time before he relented completely. “Craziest thing I ever heard of,” he said. “Grown adults behaving like children.”

  By nine o’clock we were all seated once again in the Price living room.

  “Well,” I said after a yawn. “I should be getting on my way.” I really didn’t want to hang around the house the night before Reed’s funeral.

  Julie stood and walked behind my chair, placing her hands firmly on my shoulders. “Oh, yea,” she said, pushing down a bit. “And just where do you think you’re going?”

  “Just back to my motel to get a little shuteye, is all.”

  “Nonsense,” she replied, and exerted a little more of her weight to my shoulders.

  “I’ll sleep at the motel tonight,” I argued. “My room is paid for, after all. And then we’ll see tomorrow about any plans together. We’ll be at the mansion for a while, anyway.”

  Mr. Price left the room and went upstairs. I could tell he didn’t want me staying here tonight, with Reed’s funeral tomorrow. A time for him to be with his daughters. Julie may have felt I was part of the family, but I was sure he simply thought of me as someone out of Reed’s past.

  Julie pressed down harder. “I have an extra bedroom and it’s not being used,” she said. “You might as well take advantage of it.”

  “And what about Sly?” I asked. “What will he think of a guy staying with you? I know how I’d feel if some guy I didn’t know was staying with my girlfriend.”

  Tabitha spoke for the first time in a long time. “You don’t know Sly,” she said. “The guy is remarkable.”

  “Only on his good days,” Julie added.

  Staying at Julie’s wouldn’t be so bad, I thought. And this way I wouldn’t have to spend the night by myself. “If you’re positive it’s all right,” I said, relenting.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Julie muttered. “Let’s go get your stuff from the motel and haul it to my place. You can take what you want with you when you head out to the Hill tomorrow. But my place will remain base.”

  Tabitha excused herself from the room saying she’d see me later. I could tell the reality of Reed was settling in again.

  We took my rented Camaro back to the motel. Julie had insisted we take her car, but I refused and put my foot down. After all, I did need to get my way every once in a while. She sat silently next to me as we drove down the darkened streets of Dodsville. Words seemed to be no longer a necessity.

  I thought about everything that happened in my life over the past two days. I found out my old best friend had died. Detective Pierce thought I might be Randy Beliwitz, Tabby’s boyfriend. And his interest in me proved he somehow had an interest in Reed’s drowning. But what did that prove? An old drunk at a bar commented in passing that Reed hadn’t drowned, but changed his mind when I pressed him for details. A man was murdered last night, and I was a, albeit minor, suspect. Then there was this whole business with Mrs. Klaus and her haunted mansion. No wonder I held the feeling that something was going to go completely bad.

  Then it hit me why I felt that way.

  Reed was the underlying connection between all the weird happenings in my life.

  The question left was, how?

  CHAPTER FOUR:

  Funeral

  I woke up, not knowing immediately where I was. I had been dreaming, but I couldn’t remember what it was about. Whatever it was, though, had me depressed. A clock humming gently on the table next to my bed read a digital seven o’clock. “Oh, God,” I muttered. “What am I doing up at this hideous hour?” I pulled the blankets over my head and stuffed my face into the pillow.

  “Get up,” a voice said from within the room. Someone grabbed the blankets that were protecting me from the cruelties of the world and whipped them off the bed. “We don’t sleep late around here.”

  I opened one eye to see who the intruder was. Julie stood over me, smiling, and that’s when everything flooded back to me. Today was Reed’s funeral. “Bug off,” I said, into my pillow.

  “Nice underwear,” Julie commented, and giggled.

  I knew the remark was only a futile attempt to embarrass me, so I ignored it.

  Three seconds later I found myself tumbling off the bed to the floor.

  “I said we don’t sleep late around here,” Julie said. “Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time.”

  I looked up at her from my position on the floor, and couldn’t help but smile. Julie was donned in a bathrobe and her hair was wet. She had already taken a shower. I was slightly surprised that she hadn’t wakened me an hour earlier.

  Two plates of scrambled eggs waited patiently for someone to eat them on the kitchen table. Julie sat in front of one plate, so I assumed the other was for me. We ate pretty much in silence. I guessed knowing that Reed’s funeral was in a couple of hours drained some of the energy out of both of us. My thoughts drifted back to the last time I could remember having breakfast sitting at the same table with Julie. Reed and I were doing our best to drive her nuts. We knew she hated sloppy eaters, so we shoved the cereal into our faces as fast as we could and slurped our orange juice as if it were piping hot.

  Damn you, Reed. Why couldn’t you be here now?

  “Reed talked about you often,” Julie commented. She must have noticed the expression on my face and figured out what I was thinking. “He never forgot you.”

  “I still can’t believe he went swimming at night,” I said. “He would always sit on the bank while the rest of us were flopping around in the water. He was damned scared of swimming at night.”

  Julie stood and began clearing the table. “That did cross my mind, too,” she said. “But, then, he was pretty upset that evening.”

  “I guess.”

  We spent the remainder of the morning talking about Reed. He hadn’t changed much since I knew him. He had kept that same sense of humor that was constantly getting us both into trouble. Reed never went on to college, like I knew he wouldn’t, and just worked part time at his father’s store. He always talked about leading a simple life, as uncomplicated as possible. A temporary home for orphans and abused children was built in Mayfair, a city about fifty miles south of Dodsville, and Reed spent a lot of his free time there.

  Tabitha came over right before noon. What a difference between the way Julie was handling Reed’s untimely death and the way she was. Her eyes appeared sunken in her head, and her face was absolutely pallid. My immediate impression was that somehow the life was being drained out of her. Julie and I both tried to make her laugh, but she cried instead. All those psychology courses I took in college were a waste.

  * * *

  I met Sly Williams for the first time at the funeral. When Julie introduced him to me, I liked him right way. There were some people like that in the world--ones who just oozed with some secret that made the whole earth
love them. Physically, he didn’t demand attention from anyone. His most prominent characteristic was his nonchalant attitude. He smoked a pipe and smiled a lot. I envied him. He even made Tabitha laugh while we stood outside the church.

  “So you’re the guy shacking up with my girl,” he said. He had a slight British accent that I thought, at first, was fake.

  “I’m the guy,” I replied. “And she sure does cook a mean scrambled egg.”

  “Now I wouldn’t know about that.” He took a drag from his pipe. “I’m a pancake and butter man myself.”

  Sly and I didn’t sit with the Prices during the funeral. As there were still a couple of minutes before the service started, I decided to ask Sly a few questions about Randy Beliwitz. After all, Sly was a bit on the outside and may prove to be impartial.

  He just glared at me a moment after I asked him. Then he nodded his head as though he understood some great mystery that I’d been attempting to hide. “You best stay away from that one,” he said. “He’s a handful of trouble. Yet, I’m sure you’ll discover that fact about him for yourself.”

  An old couple squeezed their way past us as they made their way down the row and seated themselves. Up front Reed’s coffin rested in the midst of a parade of flowers, closed. I had taken a brief glance at Reed from a distance though a window in the vestibule, but I was far enough away not to get a good look at him. And I wanted it that way. I wanted to remember Reed as a twelve-year old kid constantly wearing his impish grin.

  “What does Tabitha see in this creep?” I asked a minute after Sly had warned me about Randy. “Nobody seems to think too highly of him.”

  Sly was about to answer, but the organ player began to play and the minister walked up to the pulpit with his head hanging low, as ministers were accustomed to doing on such occasions.

  The funeral seemed to drag on forever, as all funerals do, but I listened intently to the eulogy. This was the last tribute, at least formally, that Reed would ever receive. The church was filled with mourners and few were forced to listen to the service from the vestibule. I wondered grimly how many people would attend my funeral if I were to die right then. Not this many, that was a given. But, on the other hand, if I had stayed in small-town Dodsville, everyone would have known me also.

  Sly stared casually at his hands and feet throughout the service, almost as if he were daydreaming. I knew I would also have to ask him about the drowning. Something inside me still gnawed at my gut about the whole thing.

  Later, there weren’t as many familiar faces at the reception as I thought there’d be. Had everyone changed so much that I couldn’t recognize them, or had a whole new crop of people taken over their positions in town? Emma Francious, Reed’s eccentric aunt, sat at the same table I did. I remembered visiting her when the Prices went to her house. Reed and I took care of her lawn. Her husband had died long before I was even born. She had been in her late sixties back then, so by now she must have been pushing eighty. She was seated directly across from Tabitha and me. Tabitha had the dubious distinction of being put in charge of keeping an eye on her.

  We were munching quietly on the chicken and on the tuna casserole when Aunt Emma decided to speak. “He opened his eyes and winked at me,” she said, then went back to picking at the chicken wing in front of her.

  Tabitha and I had been talking about Reed off and on during the meal, so the natural antecedent to “he” could only be Reed. But I figured her mind had wandered off and she had thought of someone out of her flirtatious past.

  “Who’s that?” I asked, not seeing any harm in humoring her. I reached for the last chicken leg left on the plate.

  “Why, Reed, of course,” she replied.

  Tabitha coughed up the milk she had in her mouth.

  “I was looking right at his face,” Aunt Emma continued. “I was commenting to Ira what a good job the undertaker did when Reed opened both his eyes and winked at me. Then he closed them again and went back to sleep. That Reed was always such a kidder.”

  Tabitha stared at her with eyes wide open and milk dribbling down her chin. I covered my face with my hand in disbelief. This was exactly what Tabitha didn’t need--a senile old lady telling wild tales about Reed.

  “You mean when Reed was a boy and was resting on the couch one afternoon, right?” I regretted my question even before Aunt Emma gave her rebuttal.

  “No, no,” she replied. “Ira almost fainted.” Then she went back to picking at her chicken wing, attempting to find any meat left that may have been hiding from her.

  Tabitha pushed her chair back from the table and stood. “Sorry,” she said, and walked toward the rest rooms. I quickly excused myself and followed.

  I caught up to Tabitha before she entered the bathroom door. She walked past me and headed for the church exit. I followed her outside. The day wasn’t as hot as yesterday, but the humidity struck me as though I walked into a sauna anyway.

  “She’s just a crazy old lady,” I said as we stepped away from the church and headed down a neighborhood sidewalk. “When anyone gets to be her age, the brain starts to give a little. Especially if they’ve been crazy since their fifties.”

  “Probably," she replied without looking at me.

  “What do you mean, probably?” I shot back. “Whoever heard of a dead person winking at someone from the coffin?” I grabbed her hand and stopped her. She looked up into my eyes. “I surely haven’t,” I added.

  Tabitha cracked a slight smile and was about to reply when she spotted something out of the corner of her eye. I looked down the road to see what had captured her attention. A red pickup truck approached and pulled alongside the curb next to us. Tabitha quickly pulled her hand out of my grip.

  The driver got out and strutted up to us. He was well-built, obviously worked out or had a strenuous line of work, had a short beard, and a deep set of blue eyes that immediately caught one’s attention. Almost satanic, was my first thought.

  Randy Beliwitz, I said to myself immediately. Had to be.

  If I had any doubts at first, he erased them right away. He walked right up to me, ignoring Tabitha completely, and pressed his face into mine. His breath stank of alcohol as he said, “Take a hike, jerk.”

  CHAPTER FIVE:

  Randy and Melissa

  I backed away a step and smiled as best as I could under the circumstances. “Hi,” I said. Inside I began to seethe. Yet I knew I couldn’t do anything about it for Tabitha’s sake. And besides, Randy looked like he could take me without even breaking into a serious sweat. He had on a white, grubby T-shirt that looked as if he had grabbed it out of the dirty laundry this morning. Muscles from obvious hard work rippled in the morning sun. What did Tabby see in this creep?

  Randy tapped me in the chest with his forefinger. “I said for you to scram, prick-face,” he said. “Today.”

  Tabitha gave me a look that meant to go and I’m sorry. So, that’s what I did.

  “Who the hell is that guy, anyway?” I heard him say to Tabitha as I walked back to the church.

  Tabitha replied something in a quiet voice that obviously wasn’t meant for my ears.

  Just outside the church entrance Julie and Sly were having a conversation with someone I had yet to meet. As I got close enough I saw that she was crying. Feeling too awkward to join the threesome under the circumstances, I veered off toward the minister to have a word with him.

  Julie, however, had other plans for me. “Stephen,” she called. I turned to face her and she waved me over. I obliged.

  The crying girl was beautiful, even with her mascara running down her cheeks. Long, wavy brown hair fell back over her shoulders and fluffed up in the wind. She had her hands hiding her eyes, but I saw enough of her face to know how she looked. Her body was perfectly curved.

  “Stephen,” Julie said. “This is Melissa. She was Reed’s girlfriend.”

  Melissa took her hands away from her eyes. Ravenously beautiful, I thought. Reed sure had good taste in women. “Hi,” she said to m
e, almost inaudibly. She tried to smile, but only managed to start crying again.

  Sly put his arm around my shoulders. “What do you say we go for a little walk, Steve?”

  I took the hint. “Sure,” I replied. “Where to?”

  “Oh, does it really matter?”

  “Nice meeting you, Melissa,” I said, and rather awkwardly at that.

  Sly and I headed in the same direction Tabby and I had walked just a few minutes ago. The red truck was gone, and with it Tabitha.

  “Well, I met the notorious Randy Beliwitz,” I said to Sly. “Why don’t you tell me a little more about him?”

  He puffed reflectively on his pipe a couple of times, opened his mouth as if to speak, but, instead, took another drag from his pipe. Finally he scrunched his eyebrows and replied with a question: “What exactly do you want to know?”

  “Well, I already know Reed didn’t think highly of him, and Julie agrees with Reed,” I replied. “And my brief encounter with him didn’t do a hell of a lot to prove to me otherwise. As a matter of fact, he turned me completely off.”

  Sly nodded. “That’s our Randy, all right,” he said. “He has that effect on most everyone. He’s rarely around, though, which is a small blessing. Works for a road construction team. He handles the dynamite when they need to blow their way through an outcrop.”

  I kicked at a stone on the sidewalk. “I’m having a difficult time understanding why--”

  “Why Tabitha goes out with him,” Sly cut in. “Right?”

  “Exactly.” I reached the stone I had kicked a moment ago and shot it up the sidewalk again.